SG Wealth Builder

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.