Cute Sporty Fancy Cars.....

Varieties of Yucca plants

Yucca Plants from Madam Tan's house.

Focus On LifeLong Investing

Is $1 million enough to retire comfortably?

For a modest retirement in most places in the country that may be enough money, but it probably would not be enough money in San Francisco or Los Angeles or New York City. For example, $1 million could produce about $40,000 a year. And then if you get $20,000 from Social Security that would be $60,000 without any other income. There are people in retirement who spend only $3,000 a month because they don't have a mortgage, they have a low cost of living, and they go to the early bird specials. If before you retire you are earning $200,000, then you might have to downsize a little bit.

How can you keep your nest egg safe after you retire?

The most important thing is to get your emotions under control and not make decisions based on emotions. When the market is going up people can't wait to throw money in and when it's down people pull their money out. In life there are things we can influence and things we can't do anything about. What I tell clients is that there are only four things you can control about your financial picture: how much you spend, how much you earn to an extent, your emotions, and what you do with the money that you have. You can't control the market, but you can control the decisions you make about the money that you have.

What should a baby boomer who wants to retire soon do to get back on track?

You have to think about what is more important, retiring soon or retiring well. It may not be realistic for you to retire at 58 with the lifestyle that you want and make it to 95. Now you have less money than you thought and maybe not even much job security. Some of us baby boomers all grew up with really unrealistic expectations of when we were going to retire, and we planned in a way that didn't bear fruit. But what if I told you, you could still go to Hawaii, but you can't stay at a luxury hotel? Most people say, "I can do that." You have to adjust your expectations. Or you may have to work until 62 even though we planned for 57. Let's reframe what we are going to do. Everyone around you is also going to be spending less money. The day of the $14 cosmopolitan is over. And who felt comfortable doing that anyway?

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When to Enter & Exit the Market?

We don't recommend customers to market-time. Leave asset allocation and market-timing to the professionals. What the client should do is have disciplined, regular savings. There are various segments in unit trust - cash, bonds and equities. The fund manager will play with the ratio of what he thinks should be invested in each.


All you need to do is put your money and let them do the asset allocation for you. If they feel that the market is not ready, they may leave your money untouched in fixed deposits. If they feel the market is going up, then they'll probably increase the equity ratio.

How Do u Define what's conservative, moderate and Aggressive?

We look at a person's risk appetite - how much he can stomach in terms of losses. We don't bother asking clients how much profit he can take because that's of course the higher the better; what bugs people are losses.

Anyone who can take a loss of 15 to 20% is a fairly aggressive client. When I say loss , it means that the asset can go up or down by 15% or more. If you can take more than 20% , you are very aggressive.

If you can take anything between 8 and 15%, you should be somebody who's in moderate range.

A conservative fellow can probably only take losses below 6%. He is one who will be quite jittery and loses sleep if he sees a 5% loss.

Your pain threshold will tell us whether you're conservative, moderate or aggressive investor because all asset classes will have some volatility. Of course, the higher risks also comes with the possibility of higher returns.

Ensure the future by investing today

INVEST LONG TERM, INVEST REGULARLY........THE GOLDEN PRINCIPAL

My Dream Car ?

Still have to wait......There are other more important stuff than owning one of my dream car now...Hmmmnnn......I guess I'll keep on dreaming!.

Stuck with the old, noisy, rattling vehicle.........+_+