Stagnant Networth / Portfolio... And my excuses for a married guy

******
As per some recent blog posts, these are for re-organising my thoughts for myself, for self-reflection and to hold myself accountable for events that has transpired in recent years.

Feel free to comment and point me out.
Thanks uncle cw88 for reminding me to think of lessons learned.
******

Quite some years ago, I decided not to track all my expenses, and just spend as I want to. I have already lost count of the number of years, but for me, at least I made sure I spend only what I have and paid up all credit card bills every month (credit card for ease of purchase and discounts). Nothing on debt.

One of the main thing that was nagging me on my mind, was my rate of growth of my networth. In the early years, the growth rate was rather good, but as I checked my portfolio recently, I realised I had not had much portfolio growth.

Honestly, I was puzzled, confused, and little bit unhappy. I know I have been spending a lot more, made some big investment blunders, but I thought it would have been better. And the main reason why was because I did not put a figure to everything I have been doing.

So I decided to do a reflection exercise to track back on myself past few years. It was easy to track myself on some older posts as I had not been actively posting past few years.

As I looked back at some older posts, I realised that was a point in time in Nov 2016 where my portfolio actually touched $350k. I had reached $320k at age 32 (2015), and $350k at age 33 (2016).

As it stands, my portfolio is still at around $350k in the year 2019 with about $25k++ warchest, which means there was minimal to no growth. There are still funds here and there in different bank accounts which I am too lazy to really sum all up.

So from 2016 to 2019, I only grew on average by $8k+ a year, even though my dividends is ~$18k annually. What actually happened? Since I was not spending any effort in tracking where my money went past few years, I was actually a little at a loss.  Within the 3 years, I should have had dividends of around $54k. And maybe extra savings from work. But where did they go to?

Having been too passive in those few years, I have to think back slowly in time, discover the reasons, and see where I can improve on myself.

Based on my self-reflection, there were 3 major reasons
(1) Quitted full-time job in 2012
(2) Increased expenses due to house and children
(3) Poor decisions in the stock market

Marginal safety with dividend counters -- SPH and Starhub

This is a mathematical exercise I did with my holdings in Singapore Press Holdings.


A short history of my relationship with SPH
Around the 2008~2009 era, I bought in 6000 shares of SPH at an average of $3.65
Mid of 2014, I bought in 2000 shares of SPH at $3.98 but booked in as $3.65 on my portfolio as I used "profits" from sales of other shares to offset the difference.

So, I took it as 8000 shares of SPH at $3.65 average.

With Starhub, it was quite simple. Majority were bought in 2009, with some in 2010. In summary, the average cost of Starhub was $1.90.

2015 came, and all the way till this year, I have been busy with wedding, with family, with children, with business, etc, such that I have not spent much time to look at equities. That's up till recent months, where I took interest again.

It was really eyes off market for majority of the time. I knew SPH was in a sunset industry. I knew. But I did not take any actions to sell.

Starhub was being disrupted by MNVOs. I knew. But I did not take any actions too. On my old blog post, I was considering to sell at $4.70. But I did nothing. [That was $47k on hindsight.]

I mean, it was "buy for the long term" right?
And SPH declined to $1.98 while Starhub declined to $1.34.

With that, I have actually discussed with friends before, on how the dividends from SPH and Starhub actually helped buffered the drop in price for me, and how "lucky" I was. But it was just a feel. There was no actual calculations until I did it today.