Life: I moved to beautiful new digs!

After my nearly two-month digital nomad experiment in Penang, I decided that I could no longer return to my noisy, roach-infested apartment. I found a gorgeous 3-room apartment on top of a hill. I now have my own private office, grow vegetables in my two balconies and wake up every day to the sound of bird song. I’ve never been happier. The image above is taken at one of my favourite places in the world — the sitting area at the front balcony.

Finance: Investing seriously

I spent November 2021 to March 2022 cautiously wading into investing. I opened my CDS account (an account for investors), bought my first stock (Maybank, yay!), REITs and then proceeded to start buying US ETFs directly. I also devoured a lot of finance books, starting with The Little Book of Common Sense Investing, and wondered why I took so long to read this book. It would have saved me a lot of mistakes! Currently moving money out of unit trusts, roboadvisors and fixed deposits to carve a portfolio of 60% international equities (VT, VTI and VXUS), 30% fixed income, 10% Malaysian equities (stocks and REITs). I expect it to take more than a year to achieve this.

Writing: Guides to investing

Galvanised by how difficult it was to find unbiased, straightforward content about how to invest in Malaysia, I’m currently writing first, a guide to roboadvisors and next, the basics of investing. However, because my day job involves me writing as well, my mental energy is often too tapped to write as fast as I’d like. But I’m determined to publish these guides by end of 2022.

Career: Still working from home

I’m ever so grateful that I’m still allowed to work from home when so many in Malaysia are being called back to glass towers. The traffic jams in Malaysia are so, so bad, made worse by flash floods that happen when it rains in the evening, when people are trying to come home. I’m also nearing two years at my current company, and seeing how tumultuous my career transition from journalism was, I cannot tell you how happy I am to achieve this milestone.

Reading

Perhaps it was the pandemic blues. Perhaps it’s life getting extra difficult lately, but my reading has slowed down considerably these days. This coming from someone who used to read a book in two to three days!