TO BE UPDATED
My Portfolio will be changing every month, so what you see is not necessarily what you will see in 30 days. A HUGE warning to you is that this portfolio is nothing to write home about. I started on this journey a bit too late but I’m glad I did start. Like most personal finance bloggers, our main aim is early retirement. Emergency Fund
It helps reading about what others save in their emergency fund. I can't remember the exact blog I was reading and the author mentioned one full year expenses as their target. At that point I was already above that and I had to stop and think about it. It makes perfect sense.We save our emergency fund in the money market account. I like it that its totally liquid. It gains some nice interest which grows it further.
Home Equity
I never think of my home as an investment. It is just a home. But for interest sake, let’s have it here.UPDATE: We paid our home up again.
Investments
Finally, comes our hope for early retirement. Our goal is getting more passive income from dividends, interest and rental units (and my tiny online income) to cover our expenses every month. Our/ my portfolio is totally skewed when it comes to investments, but this exercise is meant to rectify that. I don’t like it that we have so much equity on investment properties and not much in stocks, but hey, that’s how it is. At least for now. Lets go:Rental Property: Our rental property is the only part of our investment portfolio that is on target. If I were to put it in percentage, it would be at 100% on the target or more. We managed to pay up all our rental units and acquired more. And we can live on the rental income
Individual Stocks: A miracle is needed here. All I want is 50% of the rental property value. In all we are actually
UPDATE: I got rid of the unit trusts. I cant believe it took me that long to do so.
Retirement Annuities: The truth is that I wish I paid attention earlier to the tax benefits of contributing adequately to a retirement annuity. Maxing that benefit means a contribution of 15% of your income to your retirement annuity. In return, SARS gives you 35% of your contribution back. There are lots of ifs, and what nots there. It depends on whether you have another pension fund, like your employer's pension fund. I can just say, my contribution meets the 100% tax benefits. We now max this every year.We still have to add to our retirement accounts though.
Other Assets: I never want to add cars to this equation. But well we have two old ones. We don’t really have convenient public transportation in South Africa. Its just not easy to do without a car. 100% again.
SUMMARY:
INVESTMENTS | %Achieved | NOTES |
Emergency Fund | ||
Home Equity | PAID UP. |
|
ETFs | 100% | This is for my tax free savings. |
Rental Property | 100% |
|
Stocks | ||
Retirement Accounts | Current value of retirement Annuities, Pension Accounts. |
How is your portfolio and goals?
I just love the way you have written your portfolio. Unique, real and brutally honest. How you've crafted your journey by depicting some detour and changes you made along the way is really interesting. It is not only encouraging but also shows that we learn all the time and changing priorities is normal. I know you're not an adviser but I'm excited to see a few things I am already doing. This is inspiring!!
ReplyDeletehahaha, I know. Its crazy how this is not even the status quo.
DeleteWhich reminds me that I need to update this page.
Thanks a lot Thoja.