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Investing can be very lonely sometimes because it is a never-ending journey that requires you to constantly learn and hone your analytical skills. Time is the most important factor for an investor. You will have a head-start if you start learning how to invest since young.

But the fact is, nobody is born to invest. Investment skills and knowledge have to be picked up and learned, either through the hard way or attending courses. Henceforth, it is important that you invest in your human capital throughout your life. Otherwise, you might end up paying expensive tuition fees to the market.

SG Wealth Builder

To this end, SG Wealth Builder is pleased to form a partnership with fellow investment blogger, Dave, from Smart Passive Cash Flow to introduce his new membership site – See How I Trade. Like Dave, I share the notion that to be successful in investing, you must have the commitment to keep learning and earning. As a trader, Dave shares investment related articles that range from stocks, bonds, commodities and derivatives. Members can enjoy the below exclusive privileges:

1) Dave’s Daily Potential Trades

2) Dave Daily Trend Analysis

3) Dave’s Spotting of Big Boy’s Movement

4) Dave’s Weekly Trend Analysis

5) Dave’s Weekly Dow Component Analysis

6) Dave’s Recent Trade Summary

7) Strategies to use in different situations

8) Entries, Stop Loss and Targets

9) Exclusive Articles of unique movements

10) Wealth eBooks specially written for VIP Traders

For just USD60 per month, you can have a powerful investment tool that can help to level up your investing prowess. To get the discount subscription of USD49, remember to quote discount code: “sgwealthbuilder“. By investing this small amount of money, investors can benefit from Dave’s analyses, his strategies …

In recent months, I have been receiving requests from media and event organizers looking to promote their events on my blog, SG Wealth Builder. One of them was an event organizer who wished to promote Robert Kiyosaki’s event “The Power of Financial Education” held at Singapore Expo, June 2012.

I was approached a couple of weeks before the event was due to take place and was at first a bit skeptical. I mean my blog, SG Wealth Builder, is not even a popular investment blog in Singapore, so why would the event company chose to promote their event in it? I told my wife about it and she also found it puzzling.

Anyway, both the event company and me didn’t manage to work out a deal on time and so I missed the opportunity to promote Robert Kiyosaki’s event. On hindsight, I feel that it is a compliment that someone actually approached me to help them promote their events. Even though the deal didn’t go through, I feel honored that my blog, SG Wealth Builder, was considered by Robert Kiyosaki’s event company.

For the uninitiated, Robert Kiyoski is the famous author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, a motivational book on personal finance. I read his book more than 16 years ago when I was a teenager and I must say it really changed the way I viewed money, career and investment.

In fact, I would say Kiyosaki is a game changer in the industry as during that time, there were very few books that focus on personal finance and investing. He is a strong proponent of entrepreneurship, investing and financial literacy. One thing about this book is that it was written in very layman term and contains virtually no complex financial jargon.

When you read the book, you can actually …

Recently I attended one financial planning courses sponsored by my company. It was a short two days course that touched on personal financial planning. In this article, I will share my views on bad mood fund.

One thing I like about the course is that the instructors focused on educating the participants rather than pushing financial products. That was why I enjoyed the course because I did not have to second guess whether the instructors was biased in his recommendations or whether he was trying to hard sell his company’s financial products.

At the end of the course, I learned quite a few things and thought that I just have to blog it down and share with my readers. One key takeaway was the “The Bad Mood Fund”.

In life, there are always ups and downs. Most of us faced challenges and obstacles in our daily lives. As a result, we can sometimes ended up feeling bitter, frustrated and angry. One of the best ways to “cure” your negative feelings, whether you are a man or woman, would be retail therapy.

Nothing beats buying something to pamper yourself at the end of a miserable lousy day isn’t it? I mean we all live only once and I think it is important that we pamper ourselves every now and then. Otherwise, how to maintain our life motivation and jest? But we all know retail therapy can sometimes be fatal to our wallet. So how can we ensure that our retail therapy does not cripple our savings. One strategy is to set aside a Bad Mood Fund.

So how does a Bad Mood Fund works? Basically it means setting aside a portion of money from your monthly disposable income to support your retail therapy. It can be $200 or $300. The amount …

 How to be rich? How to be rich quick in Singapore?

A few months ago, I wrote an article on how to become rich in Singapore. The articles has since garnered more than 2500 page views and remained one of my most popular postings. The article has also received several feedbacks from my readers. I suppose at the back of most Singaporeans’ mind, most of us wish to know what is the shortest route to being rich in Singapore. I shall attempt to discuss more about this topic.

I always pondered aloud, what is the defintion of being rich in Singapore? Does it mean setting a monetary target of $10 million in the bank or does it refers to the state of the mind? Just yesterday, I read an article from a local Chinese newspaper about the plight of a senior engineer who was addicted to gambling. The article stated that the engineer earned more than $10,000 every month but owed gambling debts of more than half a million. Unable to withstand the constant harassment from loan sharks, the engineer committed suicide. For most Singaporeans, a monthly salary of more than $10,000 would probably make us among the top earners in Singapore. Yet apparently for this engineer, his monthly salary was not even enough for him to satisfy his gambling addictions. So I suppose the moral of the story is that it is not how much you owned or earned that make you feel rich. Rather, being rich is a state of the mind. You can have a super-scale salary of $10,000 but still struggle financially if you don’t manage your personal finance wisely. You can have $10 million in the bank but ultimately this money would evaporate if you were addicted to gambling.

So what is the …

Different people have different concepts on money. Some people define being financial free means not having to work or free from debt. Some people deemed being financial free as doing what you enjoy for a living.

Whatever the case is, it is important to define what your relationship with money is. Is your relationship with money based on fear, greed or ignorance? I came to realize that if we do not establish our relationship with money early on in our life, then we will forever have unfinished business with money. Allow me to elaborate.

Most people’s relationship with money is based on fear. We are socially conditioned to think that having a job provides us a secure income and that having a job is the only means of bringing food to the table to feed the family. However, ironically, very often we fear of being retrenched by the company during economic downturn.

We also fear of being sacked by the company when we reached our fifties and could not find another job to support our families. It is this sense of insecurity that most of us hold on to our job. To overcome this fear and insecurity, there is a need to internalize what your passion and aptitude are.

Only if you capitalize on what you are good at and what you like to do, then can you excel in your job and create a niche for yourself. If you are good and always in demand, then you need not worry about being sacked by your company. Even if you are being sacked, if you have niche skills, you can always set up your own business.

Another form of negative relationship with money is greed. If you are obsessed with money, it can become detrimental to many aspects of your …

In the investment circle, everyone knows the golden rule of setting targets for investments. But how many investors actually put that into practice when the crunch comes? After all, greed and fear often come into play whenever we make important financial decisions. To build wealth, you must learn how to manage your emotions in your investments

Investors often make irrational decisions, leading to losses in their investments. They sell their stock holdings when the stock market crashes and buy when the market booms. When they lost money, they blame their stock brokers, they blame the market, they blame the stock analysts. They blame the whole world except themselves. What most investors failed to realize is that the greatest investment enemy is within ourselves and that we failed solely because of our ego and fear.

When I started investing as a newbie 13 years ago, I belonged to this category. I felt like a winner when I made money from my stock investments and a loser when I lost money. Over the year, my thinking changed as I read from self-improvement books, articles and magazines. I came to realize that managing your ego and fear is crucial to our decision-making and that when it comes to investing, it’s not about winning or losing the game. It’s about setting our personal targets and not let greed and fear rule our heads.

Gambling and investing are not the same. We are unable to manage the outcome of the former, but for the latter, we can always make wise decisions and produce a positive outcome. Control your destiny and grab the bull by its horns!

Magically yours,

SG Wealth …

Are you going through the motions right now? Sometimes, we need to know our life purposes. After all, we only live once. Recently one of my colleagues attended a personal finance workshop arranged by my company. I was very interested to attend because the topics seemed very relevant to me but eventually I was unable to make it due to work commitments.

Over lunch, my colleagues updated me that the workshop indeed was very useful as it touched on various money issues in the local context, like CPF, hospitalization shields, life insurance and retirement plans. The instructor also gave tips on investments and the key concept of managing personal finances (budgeting, knowing the difference between “needs” and wants”).

OK, I thought to myself. These information and tips seemed rather useful but are actually quite fundamental stuff to me. Probably it could help a person become more financially astute but probably won’t enable him to become a rich person one day. But what set me thinking was a statement that my friend told me the coach wanted the participants to remember for life and that is: Always question yourself and know what are your purposes in life.

Knowing our life purposes is important. We must have goals in our lives, something that we hope to achieve one day. Money itself is only a means that can probably help us attain our goals faster. But even if we became rich overnight and yet do not have any meaningful goals in life, we will only be lost and empty in our hearts.

In fact, I have read numerous articles on punters winning multi-millions lotteries only to end up spending every single cent away after a few years. Ironically, most of these “lucky” souls ended up poorer than before they won the prizes. Therefore, …

Through interactions with some of my friends, I came to realize that no investors become wealthy through herd investing. In order to become a successful investor, we need to equip ourselves with the right knowledge. We must have a curious mind and a thirst to acquire new knowledge. After all, knowledge is key.

It is very important that you start your investment or wealth-building journey early on in your life because that will give you a head-start. But before you start splashing out money on various investment schemes, always remember to build up your knowledge first.

If you plan to invest in property, options, gold, ETF, etc, attend courses and seminars to deepen your understanding on how these investments work. Read up topics on these subjects in the magazines, books and online articles on investment strategies. Talk to people, listen to their tips and learn from their investment mistakes.

You may also subscribe to my blog for free email notifications of new articles. Over the years, my followers and readership have been increasing. While this is flattering, I also feel the responsibility to write better content.

One of my motivations of starting this online project – SG Wealth Builder- is to raise my investment competency. Through my sharing, I also hope to level up the knowledge of fellow Singaporeans. My vision is that we can build a better tomorrow together and forge a shared financial destiny. Sometimes building wealth can be a lonely journey. So in building this blog, I aim to shape a community to share ideas and information on how to be better wealth builders.

In short, sharpen your knowledge on investment first before you start investing. Don’t be in a hurry to lose your money. You will realize that the more you learn, the more you don’t …

In life, we must always learn how to sell in order to achieve success. When I just started working as a manufacturing engineer in the aerospace sector, I always thought that my department (operations) was the most important department in my company. This was because I felt that without engineers solving problems in the production lines, the company would not be able to function as per normal.

It was only years later that I realized that my thinking was flawed. The most important department in every private organization has to be the sales department. Every profit-driven company exists because of sales. Without sales, there will be no company.

The problem with sales is that most people view it in a derogatory context, like a pushy insurance salesman or a telemarketer who interrupts your meetings. Most of us do not want to appear like those people, so we either sell passively (inform family members and hope they spread the word) or skip the selling exercise entirely. The result is half-baked effort and wasted time and money put toward building a business concept that will not come to fruition.

It is extremely hard for an inventor or entrepreneur to succeed if you do not change this mind-set because every type of business requires sales. Whether its selling an insurance policy or pitching your business ideas to potential investors, you must be  able to talk confidently about what you are offering in order to get people interested in your product or ideas.

So if you want to be successful in your business, you have to overcome the sales stigma and learn how to sell.

Magically yours,

SG Wealth …

What are the three ways to become rich in Singapore?

Many of us will agree that the cost of living is very high in Singapore. This is especially so during the last few years when the rate of inflation increased rapidly. In spite of the global economic downturn, unemployment rate remains low in Singapore.

But most Singaporeans struggle with the rising costs, as their salaries remain stagnant. Henceforth, most of us are concerned whether we would make enough money to retire comfortably in our twilight years.

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Recently, me and my good friend were lamenting the rising cost of living in Singapore and pointed out that the same bowl of $2.00 noodle sold in the hawker stall now costs $2.50 or more. That would represent a 20% increase in prices and we were left wondering how an average salaried Singaporean can cope with this sort of inflation.

We came to the conclusion that to beat the inflation and get out of the rat race, we need to be rich. And there are mainly three ways to get rich [This is a premium article. The rest of the content is blocked and can be accessible by SG Wealth Builder Members only. To read the full content, please sign up as member.]

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