About Me

Welcome to my blog!

I am The Ipoh Investor, an ordinary man from Ipoh in his late 20s currently working in Singapore & striving to retire early by 40 in Ipoh. I am constantly thinking of ways to earn more, save more and manage my investment portfolio prudently so that I can consistently beat the market. I believe that only through discipline, hard-work & patience, I can achieve the dream of retiring before 40 and I know I can achieve it! Life is not just about compulsory work. It has to be more than that.
Thus, this blog shall exist with the sole purpose to document my investing journey, thoughts and lessons learned along the way for as long as I utilize it.


My background

I graduated with an engineering degree at NUS. Engineering courses trained me to be attentive to details and analyse information from sets of data and charts. But interestingly, I was insensitive to my monthly expenses because either I don't really care about money in the past or I was plain lazy and carefree. However, things changed when I get exposed to the ugly side of human nature in corporate world.


How I got into investing

I had complicated feelings towards my first job as I have learnt some of the most important lessons from corporate world. Just like video games, you need to know how to play the corporate game in order to survive and thrive to the top. All these "wisdom" reduced me from a passionate person to a typical ordinary wage slave, just like the rest of people with emotionless face (perhaps with little frustration) you will expect when squeezing through tiny spaces in MRT every single day.

Despite my relatively young age, I begin to feel sick from playing this kind of game. I can't imagine myself to continue like this for decades. So, I spend quite some time to figure out how to get out of the rat race. It was through reading blogs and self-help books, I realize that I can get out of it through having passive income streams with enough cash flow to at least cover your living expenses. To me, there are two ways to build such income: entrepreneurship or investing. As I am timid, reserved & laid back, entrepreneurship is clearly out of my league. So, I decided to spend more time perfecting my investing skills.

My Investing Styles

There are two ways to earn money from stock market: Capital Gain or Dividend.

I am more inclined towards income investing, meaning I will invest in stocks that provide dividends in cash because the dividends I received do provide me a sense of security. However, I soon learned that one shall not blindly chase after dividend yield alone, especially when the dividend yield is above 8% under un-depressed stock market condition. Such high dividend yield is unsustainable and sooner or later the company will cut its dividend payout, causing its share price to drop further.

So, after researching on multiple books and blogs on investing, I decided that I will go for dividend growth investing - invest in stocks with consistent dividend per share growth over the past 5 to 10 years.

Occasionaly, I will invest in value-growth stocks and asset-play stocks for some capital gains.

My Investment KPI

The word "KPI" surely will stress people out as your employers often use that to access your performance during performance appraisal or career promotion justification. Unfortunately, it is a necessary evil because we need it to quantify and track performance. Even Singapore market itself has Straits Times Index to do the job.

As of now, my current KPI is to achieve the first SGD 100k by 2023. If I commit to save 20k per year, I can achieve this KPI easily.

My end-game KPI: to achieve monthly passive income of at least RM 3500 (I intend to retire in Malaysia) + settle all my student loans before 40 years old. Then, I will settle down in Ipoh to enjoy my life of freedom.

Thanks for reading!