It's been quite a while since I posted! Life and COVID happened, and I was just really focused on surviving through the pandemic. It was quite tough doing child care, adjusting to a new country and the new work from home situation. As you may have noticed, I have removed my campaign for Etoro because I moved to Interactive Brokers for many reasons (will explain this in a separate blog post). Here's a rough breakdown of our assets:
As you can see, our NW is quite cash heavy as of the moment. This consists of our emergency funds both in PH and Ireland. When the pandemic happened, we decided to increase our funds in Ireland to one year's worth of expenses to ease our anxiety. We also had to build a medical emergency fund for my in-laws, given that my husband was the breadwinner of his family. I also have two dogs left back home and needed to build an emergency fund for any veterinary needs. We were able to complete our Ireland EF and my pets' funds, but we're still 33% on the medical fund.
Our EU Investments consists of my company pension fund that is invested on MSCI World Index and an actively managed fund for mid-term goals. Ireland has some tax benefits for pension funds and our company matches the amount that I put in, which means free money (yay!). We're investing in an actively managed fund in Ireland (under a company called Zurich) for the mid-term (5 years) goals like down payment for a house or college funds for our daughter. The reason (yea, I know what you're thinking) we went for the actively managed fund because we didn't want to deal with the complicated IRL tax structures and let the company handle it.
As for our PH investments, this consists of Pagibig MP2 (35%) and FMETF (65%). We've separated Real Estate on a separate bucket, though those are in PH. My reason for that is because I'm not considering it as an "Investment" until it produces cash flow. We're still paying the equity, and I'm really glad it's going to be turned over in around 4-5 years from now. Due to the pandemic, rentals would probably be a bad business right now. Planning to save up to pay the rest in cash, but there's still a lot of uncertainties.
Last but not the least, our US Investments, which consists of only two funds: VTI (80%) and VXUS (20%). VTI represents the US Total Stock Market which also covers the whole of S&P 500. VXUS represents the International Total Stock Market which are large cap companies in the rest of the world. This strategy is called the "boglehead" strategy (this deserves a separate post on its own). Boglehead portfolios usually have BND, but I think we're still quite young to be able to be more aggressive and defer adding bonds.
Where am I in my FIRE Goals?
I'm not going to disclose the numbers where they are calculated against for our own protection. But based on the numbers, I should be on track to going LEAN in 5 years time, but quite far away from being FAT. But what's important is we're making progress despite the crazy situation. :-)
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