TJJ Learning Journal | Dividend Investing for FIRE

This financial literacy series is aimed at covering the simple, foundational principles of personal finance. This can be helpful to young people or anyone who wants to take charge of money in their lives. To begin, let's start with the big picture, the ultimate scorecard of your financial health: your Net Worth .  Your Financial Scorecard: Understanding Net Worth  Your Net Worth is a good measure of your financial position, and it's calculated using a simple personal balance sheet. It’s composed of three parts:  Assets : Things you own that have value (e.g., your stocks, cash in the bank, your property). Liabilities : Money you owe to others (e.g., your personal loans, credit card debt, home loan). Net Worth : The value of your assets after subtracting all your liabilities. Here's a simple example: Assets : $10000 (Cash) + $50000 (Stocks Portfolio) = $60000  Liabilities: $15000 (Student Loan) Net Worth = $60000 (Assets) - $15000 (Liabilities) = $45000 Our goal ...

Have you heard of the "September Effect"? It’s a well-documented market anomaly where the months of August and September tend to be the weakest for stock market returns. For some of us, it could be a time of anxiety and fear of a market correction. For dividend investors, this is period of market weakness can be the most powerful opportunity in the entire year. While others are worried about falling prices, my focus is on the steady stream of cash hitting my account.  Market's Fear vs. My Cash Flow A large number of blue-chip companies are paying out dividends from late August to September. I will be receiving dividends from the following companies in the 2-3 weeks to come: OCBC, DBS, UOB, CDG, MIT, MLT, CICT.  This can set up a favorable scenario in which market sentiment is at its lowest, while my cash flow is at its highest throughout the entire year. The sea of market red becomes a supermarket sale for me to go shopping.   My Q3 Reinvestment Watchlist...

The Straits Times Index (STI) has been climbing. If you’ve been invested for a while, your portfolio is likely looking very green. It’s an exciting time, but it also brings a unique set of emotions. We get a sense of satisfaction from seeing our holdings appreciate, generating large capital gains. But it's also mixed with a nagging anxiety that these capital gains would disappear once the market corrects.  My Anchor in Cash Flow While capital gains are nice, they aren't my primary goal. My portfolio is first and foremost a cash flow generating machine.  My main benchmark for success isn't the market value of my portfolio, which can swing wildly based on market sentiment. Instead, I ask a simpler question: "Is my total dividend income growing year over year?" This focus on ever-growing cash flow anchors me. The dividends I receive are real, tangible returns paid from the actual profits of the businesses I own . They are a direct reward for being a part-owner, and u...

While my life now focuses on career as a Computer Science student, this article shares another part of my life that has been ever-present.  I’ve been involved in Scouting for many years, starting as a young boy and now continuing as a volunteer adult leader. The Scout motto is simple but profound: "Be Prepared."  That once used to mean knowing the right knots to tie or knowing how to start a fire. As I become older and see the world differently, I've found that its most valuable lessons are about mindset, planning and temperament. Sequential Thinking in Planning and Coding Have you ever done planning for a large-scale event? It is a rather intensive exercise in structured, sequential thinking. Your event planning is broken down into smaller components such as food, logistics, safety, activities and contingency plans. You have different people working on different components, and then we try to orchestrate everything together in a logical, step-by-step manner. Every a...

Have you ever felt drowned in financial data? You open a stock screener and are bombarded with dozens of metrics: EV/EBITDA, discounted cash flow models, Sharpe ratios, beta, alpha... It’s enough to make anyone’s head spin. The world of finance often feels like it's designed to be complex, making you feel like you need a PhD to pick a good stock. I too felt that pressure to understand everything. But this complexity was causing anxiety, and if there's one rule I live by, it's that my investments must let me sleep soundly at night . This led me to embrace a well-known engineering principle: KISS, or "Keep it Simple, Stupid." It’s not about being lazy or ignorant. It’s about having the discipline to ignore the noise and focus on the handful of things that would drive long-term returns.   The Trap of Over-Complicating It's easy to fall into the trap of what I call 'feelings analysis'—making decisions based on market noise, hype, or complex economic models...