Earn more and spend less on investment expenses (explicit & non-explicit)!

Similar to the concept of "Save more and spend less on your income", a person should also ensure that he/she "Earn more and spend less on investment expenses"! This is also another very important concept to make more money! This is why I hate to invest in Unit Trusts / Mutual Funds and investment-linked insurance policies! These types of investment instrument have very high expenses (they are non-explicit, charged to the account and you don't see them!). Just give you an example, a unit trust (UT) manager is able to earn market returns of say 8% a year over 10 years. However, the management expenses come out to be about 3% a year (yes, that is the kind of UT expenses you are looking at in Singapore!). Therefore, your actual net return is only 5% per year. To see the significance, I assume you put in $240,450 into the Unit Trust for 10 years (let's just make the figure about the same as what you will get at 65 years old when you contributed CPF minimum sum of $155,000 at 55 years old): At 8% compounded return a year, at the end of 10 years, you should get back $344,044. At 5% compounded return a year, at the end of 10 years, you should get back $255,286. So, the 3% annual management expenses actually costs you to lose $88,758, which is almost (88,758/155,000) = 57.3% of your original capital!

How to quickly obsolete your job before your job obsoletes you!

As a follow up to my previous post titled "Better quickly obsoletes your job before your job obsoletes you!", I would like to briefly summarize the tactics to "How to quickly obsolete your job before your job obsoletes you", as follow:

1) When started working, save much more than you spend!

2) During the day, work you "work".  During the evening, work on your "investment"! 

Above are the 2 keys to being able to help you to be able to quickly obsoletes your job before your job obsoletes you! 
The above is also the Solution to "Why you work so hard but you are still poor?"

You may ask: How much should you save from your salary? 
Well, there is no hard core number or percentage, but the more the merrier! 
To give you an example, when I started working, I saved 50% of what I earned.
5 years later, despite increase in my income, I kept my expenditure constant, and I increased the amount I saved to >70%!
When I have more money in my bank for rainy days, I started to spend more again and the amount I can save dropped to less than 50% (despite further increase in income).

I feel that average of about 50% is about the right figure because with 50%, for every year you had worked, you can afford to retire for 1 year!  So theoretically, if you start working at 25 years old, and assume you can live to 85 years old, you would probably work for 30 years and by saving about 50% of your income, you can afford to retire at 55 years old and enjoy your retirement with no monetary worry for >30 years (assuming your return from your pot of fund is equal to inflation).

Diversified investments

In terms of diversification of investments, I am currently invested in the financial instruments (mainly stocks) listed in these countries:
1) Singapore
2) US
3) HK (and H-shares as proxy to China)
4) Germany

I have exposure to these currencies:
1) SGD
2) USD
3) HKD
4) EURO

What is the outlook of private residential property prices in Singapore?

Property investment seems like a favourite investment class in Singapore.  This is particularly so for private residential property prices in Singapore where there is "more free" market and can be purchased by foreigners (compared to the public HDB flats - which is restricted to citizens).  It is not difficult to see why, given that the best place to invest in properties have the following characteristics:

1) Small available land area (Singapore is just a small dot of about 700 sqm in the world!)

2) High population density (Singapore is the top most populated country in the world!)

3) High GDP per capita (Singapore has one of the highest GDP per capita in the world!)

But given the many private residential property cooling measures implemented by the Singapore government, what is the private residential property price outlook from here?

Let me make a proper summary and will get back here to let you know my view............