Friday, January 8, 2016

Passive Income Review 2015

Finally received all the information i needed to do a review of the passive income for 2015.












Currently i have 3 streams of income, and hopefully i can eventually grow it to a stage where it can support my daily expenses. Currently the target is $4,000, a figure which i derived from my average expenditures tracked in 2015.

See Expenses Review 2015

(1) Options Strategy
This is a bad year for my options-strategy due primarily to the huge market fluctuation in July/August 2015. 1 bad trade nearly wiped off my whole year's profit. In actual fact though, i would not have suffered such a hit if i have done set a cut-loss when the swing is more than 10%. However, i did not expect the swing to be of such magnitude, and i closed off the position at a huge loss. To be honest, i think i panicked a little with this options trade. The lesson learn would be for me to have better risk management.

Even though the money i put in here for options trading is my 'play money', i still do feel heart pain to the loss suffered. I think the concept of loss aversion is very true here. I hope to do better utilizing options for passive income in 2016. Compared to 2014's passive income, 2015 is a disaster.

(2) Dividends
Dividend income for 2015 almost doubled from 2014 as the market tumbled a little in the later part of 2015. I took the opportunity to load up a little on STI ETF. That contributed to the increase in dividends from 2nd half 2015 onwards. In 2015, i'm looking forward to a full year's contribution from dividend income from those new positions entered, and hopefully as more funds come in, i can take advantage of the further weakening of equities prices in 2015.

On a whole, while dividends doubled, the total amount is still quite minuscule, just 2.1k for the whole year. Definitely need to build this up.

(3) Rental
Slight improvement from last year. Although this is relatively stable. The major contribution to the improvement comes mainly from the strengthening of USD over SGD. For a same amount of USD rental income, i get more SGD (not that i actually FX it back to SGD for me to use)

What i did with the income is using the income generated from this rental to add to the investment monies i hold with my wife. Hopefully, it can grow again to a substantial amount.

Summary:
Total passive income for 2015 is $7,008, which works out to be $584 per month. A far cry from the target of $4,000.
I guess that's why i need this blog - to serve as a tracker and to motivate myself to keep up the journey to work towards financial independence.

2 comments:

  1. interesting rental property. is that not a singapore property?

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  2. nay, it's a small little US property purchased a couple of years back. looking for a Singapore one though. Waiting for prices to come down more first.

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