First (and only) "Evening with AK and friends" in 2016.

For quite a while now, some readers have been asking me when am I going to have another "Evening with AK and friends"? It has been many moons since the last time we had one.

A thousand apologies but AK has been lazy this year, amongst other things.

OK, finally, there will be an "Evening with AK and friends" in July. Yes, that's next month. 

Depending on the response, it could be the only session this year or we might have another one. 

Actually, I hope that it is the only session we will run this year.

Yes, AK is lazy.

Bad AK! Bad AK!

Here are the details:

Date: 

15 July 2016 (Friday).

Time: 

7.00 pm to 9.45 pm.
Location: 

Lifelong Learning Institute, Event Hall 1-1.

This is next to Paya Lebar Square and the nearest MRT station is Paya Lebar. (Duh...)

My good friend, Kenji Tay, from The Fifth Person is helping me to organise this event and I am very lucky to have Victor Chng and Rusmin Ang join me on the panel. Some of you might know these two very intelligent young men who are brilliant investors too.

For those of you who are not familiar with how "Evening with AK and friends" operates, it is basically a gossip question and answer session. 

Fun and laughter with a bit of sharing thrown in? 

Yes, in that order. 

What? You think attending "Evening with AK and friends" will make you a successful investor?

Best to ask those who attended before.

If you still want to come to the event, tickets are priced at $28.00 each. Get your tickets: HERE.

Seats are limited. So, fastest fingers first.
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UPDATED ON 
4 JUNE 16 (11.30 PM).

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I have received requests from some readers for more tickets to be released. Unfortunately, we have already exceeded the room's "official" max capacity.

So, in the weeks leading up to the event, those who bought tickets but are unable to go might want to post a note here. There will be some appreciative buyers. 

Related post:

Evening with AK and friends: Photos.

Reader is upset to have missed the boat.

This is an email from a reader:
Hi AK,

I had not been checking the news on Saizen reits. But i had been following the price.

I am disappointed to hear that it has completed their transfer of assets to Triangle TMKback in March 2016.

Just wanted to share my disappointment with you, as you know i am accumulating my funds in hope that i could start buying SAIZEN Reits.

Now i felt completely demotivated.

Is that why its at 0.09cents? Excuse my ignorance.

Regards,
B

Others might have missed the Saizen REIT boat but for different reasons.

They missed it because it is Japanese. Many were fearful because they heard from people that Japan is going the way of the Dodo. Well, it easy to believe that. 

Japan has been suffering from deflation for 20 years and housing prices are so depressed that a studio apartment in Tokyo is way cheaper than one in Singapore's CBD by a big margin.


Well, I am not going to tell B or anyone if they should buy or sell anything. I always say that my blog is a place where I come to talk to myself but it just happens that there are people listening in. Ahem...

All of us want to make money from Mr. Market. No one wants to lose money.

It has been said that the fear of losing money is a much stronger emotion than the feeling of greed to make more money. 

That is easy to understand because we want to protect what we already have in hand.

We don't have any emotional attachment to money that we have yet to make.

Anyway, there are many boats out there and there will be another boat we can board.

Don't be upset if we have missed a boat.

"Money not made is not the same as money lost."

Related posts:
1. Saizen REIT: Why did I buy and would I buy more?
2. Saizen REIT: Offer of $1.172 per unit.

More speculation, bigger the bubble.

I had dinner with a friend (and let's call him G) who is the academic sort. He spends a lot of time with plants and I have been picking his brains with regards to caring for my little planter in the sky. 

One of the things we talked about during our after dinner chat was real estate investment. We were really gossiping because a mutual friend bought a condo unit a year or so ago and is now under water (i.e. the developer slashed prices for the remaining units).

I said to G that since this mutual friend of ours bought it because he likes the condo and wants to stay there, then, let us close an eye. It is a consumption item. For many, it is hard to be rational about a highly emotive thing like a home.

G told me that I was mistaken. It was bought as an investment. Alamak, as an investment, it was a bad idea. Price too high. Yield too low and likely to become lower. Throw in capital loss and we have a pretty horrible brew, I said.

Not surprisingly, many people think that property prices will always go up and are willing to pay the price as long as they can afford it. 

We must remember that it should never be about affordability. It should always be about value for money.

I highlighted USA's lost decade and also how property prices in Japan deflated for 20 years which means that the Japanese experienced not one but two lost decades.

Why did Japan become a nation of mostly renters? 

The Japanese people don't want to take the risk of buying a house today only to see its value half 10 years later.

G said, "This is Karma!"

Well, to be fair, G doesn't have any training in Economics and he probably did believe that there were Karmic forces at work.

I said, "Bubble."

I think I was somewhat curt.

Bad AK! Bad AK!

So, I am making up for it with this blog post.

Basically, when people pay high prices expecting that future earnings will justify those prices, there is an element of speculation.

More speculation, bigger the bubble.

So, if we remember the Rule of 15 which really means a property should have a rental yield of at least 6.6% (or a price earnings ratio of about 15x) before we think about buying, buying a property that has a gross yield of only 2% or 3% is highly speculative. (See related post #2 for more on the Rule of 15.)

Well, if we somehow know for sure that renters will be willing to pay two times or three times more than the rent they pay today, then, these low yielders could turn out to be pretty decent investments in future.

A working crystal ball, anybody?

The same goes for investing in stocks and I will let the related posts below do the rest of the talking.

So lazy!

Bad AK! Bad AK!


Related posts:
1. Affordability and value for money.
2. To buy or not to buy? Rule of 15.
3. $1.14 a share cheaper than 93c a share?

An unbeatable level of certainty in wealth building.

Although we have to take chances sometimes, I always try to inject a high level of certainty in my life. 

Generally, I do not like leaving things to chance because there is a chance that things could go wrong.

So, when people tell me I should have taken a 5 year loan to buy my car because the interest rate is only 2.68% per annum and I could use the money to invest for higher returns, what do I say to them?






Apart from telling them that the effective interest rate is really higher than that, I would ask them how sure are they that they would not suffer a capital loss or that the investment returns would not dip or disappear in those 5 years?


(If we could only afford to buy a car by taking a huge loan to do so, wouldn't we be financially better off not buying the car?)

Without taking a car loan, however, I know I have avoided a hefty sum in interest payment over a 5 years period. That is certain.







When people tell me that some financial gurus tell their students that they don't need to keep cash aside as emergency funds, that they only need to have credit cards and lines of credit, how certain are they that their debt would not one day snowball (or, worse, the credit lines terminated)?

Imagine dealing with an emergency with borrowed funds and having to pay interest. 





Remember that if we have to dip into an emergency fund, the situation could be dire and it could also happen at a time when our source of income dries up.

Sometimes, it is not whether we are responsible borrowers or not. 

Sometimes, life just throws us a curve ball or deals us a bad hand of cards. I think you get the idea.

I have an emergency fund although I have what might seem to be a comfortable passive income stream. Why? 

Is there any certainty that my passive income stream would not slow to a trickle or dry up one day?







This is also why I strongly believe that we need a risk free and volatility free component in our investment portfolio. 

So, I max out the benefits of my CPF membership. 

It might not make me rich but if everything else failed, I know I won't become old and destitute.






As investors, often, we have to take risks but, as savers, a penny saved is a penny earned. 

We should all try to be good savers first on our journey to financial freedom because that level of certainty in wealth building is unbeatable.






Leave fewer things in life to chance? 

Yes, please.

Related posts:
1. Don't think and grow rich.
2. A meaningful emergency fund is important?
3. A note on the CPF.