3 things I learnt about myself from Seedly’s recent event

Seedly is probably the only company that is able to organize a finance event in Singapore that managed to get people in their 20-30s to show up for a 6-hour long event, and make them pay $30 to attend.

On a lovely Saturday morning, I joined the bunch of lovely folks from Seedly at their exclusive meetup, Coffee Meets Investing. It’s a one-day meetup that discusses about a variety of topics around personal finance and investments.

Decide how much insurance coverage is sufficient for you

The recommendations made by Kenneth from Seedly on insurance planning was very similar to my low-cost insurance planning strategy. Making insurance decisions based on your income, spendings and liabilities made a lot of sense to me.

Kenneth also shared how I should choose insurance products and have meaningful decisions with my insurance agent. It’s a very sensible way in making insurance choices. The product(s) has to providesufficient coverage, cost the lowest among its competitors and purchased for the right reasons.

I still make wrong investment decisions, even on hindsight

You know how people say hindsight is always 20/20?

Wrong!

Tai Zi from AutoWealth conducted a quiz where all the questions on investment decisions revolve around both recent and historical events. You’d think that with full information about market performances, everyone should get almost full marks right?

That wasn’t the case. Not even close!

Looking at the scoreboard, many participants were getting many of the questions wrong just like me.

The truth about making investment decisions by anticipating the results from political and economic events are really hard. Even economists don’t always get it right.

The exercise made me feel better about my investment decision to invest through AutoWealth since the start of 2018. By keeping investment simple and automated, I do not have to make any investment decisions (pretty sure I’d get it wrong anyway) at all. 🙂

Stock picking techniques did not excite me at all

Seedly invited a few folks to talk about investments, specifically on Dividend Investing by Chua I-Min and Factor-based Investing by Alvin Chow.

I think the topics are very interesting to the audience, but not to me.

Let’s talk about investing for dividends or income. I didn’t think it’s applicable at my current life stage because I’m still gainfully employed, working my way to financial independence. I don’t depend on my investments for income (yet) so I would much rather invest for capital appreciation instead.

When I’m ready to retire, I will then reduce my asset allocation to focus more on investing for income.

I’ve listened to Alvin Chow talk about Factor-based Investing before and I’ve read articles from quite a number of finance bloggers about the topic. It was just too complicated for me and I prefer to spend time NOT analyzing annual reports from companies.

Seedly helped me understand what I like and dislike about finance

I’m really thankful that Seedly took the time and effort to organize such a comprehensive event that covers the various topics around personal finance and investing without the hard-sell that usually comes with such events.

Over time, I can tell that I don’t like to spend a lot of time on identify individual stocks for investment. Instead, I’d very much prefer to keep them as simple as possible, and automate the entire wealth accumulation process.

Personal finance on the other hand, is something I’m more passionate about and I’ll try to write more about my thoughts on this topic more often in this blog.

Did you attend Seedly’s Coffee Meets Investing meetup? What are your thoughts about the event?