Month: October 2022

Get free Xen crypto today (just need minimal gas fees)

The link to mint your Xen can be found here: https://xen.network/mainnet/mint

Note:

  1. use a metamask burner wallet
  2. you will need a very small token ETH for gas (the minting is otherwise free still)

Xen crypto which aims to empower individuals.

Some quick notes:

  • No pre-mint
  • No Admin Keys
  • Immutable Contract
  • No listings on CEXs (I think this doesnt apply anymore, as they’re listed on some centralized exchanges for secondary market)
  • Starts with zero supply 100%
  • Transparent and on chain

Jack Levin

Jack Levin (born in 1974, St. Petersburg, Russia) emigrated with his family to the United States in 1990, where he studied computer science at the University of Missouri. He played a key role in building an early Google infrastructure, and he’s known in the tech industry as a serial entrepreneur who built a series of startups and as an angel investor. He got interested in Bitcoin in 2010 and remains in the crypto space to this day. After a string of successes, he recently came up with something special that has the power to change the world. Levin is creating XEN, a global currency for the people.

Google #21 – Levin’s interest in technology started at the age of 16 when he got his first computer and learned by downloading and reading documents from Usenet groups. He became an expert-level Web 1.0 developer, server system architect, network designer, and Linux master and moved to Silicon Valley, where he was doing security for offices and early Internet on-ramp companies. After creating the first open source embedded computer running Linux with a firewall and a VPN, he met Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, in 1999, and he got a job as their 21st early employee.

Taken from: https://www.xencrypto.io/whos-jack-levin/, go to the link to read more about Jack. There’s a lot to read and unpack.

Additional Links

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Celsius doxxed ALL user wallets and what this means to you

It’s a damned shame.

Celsius not only bites the dust (they’re bankrupt and insolvent now, which means they’re being liquidated and closing shop).

A couple of days back in Oc 2022, they filed a 15,000 page report with ALL the names of their clients and crypto withdrawal addresses…and what this means to you is that if you had EVER put any coins on celsius at all, even 1 USDC, your details is there in that report.

ie you’ve been doxxed

What does doxxed mean?

Doxxed means that you’re visible on the blockchain network, to those who knows how to find you.

Reason being any crypto or digital wallets that can be linked to your name by finding out which addresses paid or received X amount of tokens to/from celsius…ie people who want to find you and who knows how to, they can.

Do you need to worry?

99% of the time, no.

It’s a problem only if you’re

  1. a criminal,
  2. a tax evader or
  3. a political activist being prosecuted in your country

#1 and #2 means it’s already wrong doing involved…so…if that’s you, stop it as much as possible. There are many ways to earn money and to have fun.

What should you do about celsius’ doxxing?

You can care less and ignore, or, you can consider preserving your privacy by looking for a place that dont do KYC. This will keep your info safe from prying eyes.

Special note:

This document also revealed that Mashinsky and his wife withdrew $12M when they said they didnt.

This means that there seems to be some inside job or inside knowledge, pre-celsius shutting down. Definitely not a good thing in my opinion, and I’m sorry for the victims who got caught up in this. Hang on in there.

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Earn $1000 extra per month (Part 2)

People are very willing to pay for time and convenience. Combine this with the sharing economy, and you’d find that you may have a much easier time earning an extra $1000+ per month.

App-based gigs

  • Transport: Uber, Grab, Lyft
  • Food: Doordash, UberEats, GrabFood
  • Parcel: uparcel, lalamove
  • Tasks: taskrabbit, quest

There’s so many app-based gigs that you can use, literally at touch / click of buttons, to get side gigs and get paid for doing them. You can literally do that now by going into Apple or Android app store and searching and registering.

Once you’re approve, go through and choose jobs that’s part of your routine or transportation (you can even deliver food by foot!) and get paid.

Traditional stuff

  • Grass cutting / lawn mowing
  • Pet sitting
  • House sitting
  • Tutoring (will need specific skills and certs)
  • etc

Renting out your spare rooms

If you bought a space and have 1 or more rooms that you actually dont use, a popular house-hack is to rent out the spare rooms. You can

  • get a realtor / agent to help you secure longer term tenants
  • use apps like airbnb for short term tenants

These revenue can be used to pay for the mortgage itself and you can save on interest or invest into other assets.

Start an online business

One of my all-time favorites is starting an online business (I recommend learning here), for so many reasons including

  1. very low costs
  2. no income ceiling
  3. very portable ie you can work on your online business in any countries
  4. transferrable skill
  5. sellable asset
  6. passive income (set up once, earn again and again because online business works 24/7)

Of course it’s not easy and takes time (like any other skill) and will require serious dedication.

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Make $1000 extra per month (Part 1: the easy way)

Earning money can be easier than you think, but it will require some form of work and inconvenience.

It’s not free (at least not yet, at later advanced stages, it can be almost risk and effort free, but that’s at larger sums). Here’s 5 of the simplest ways you can start earning at least $1000/month.

Kill off or downgrade underused subscriptions

  1. Gym membership – you can workout at home
  2. Most expensive internet to standard internet
  3. Streaming services (you dont need that many eg Disney+, Netflix, Cable, Amazon Prime, Google TV, Spotify etc)

Sell off your 2nd and 3rd car (as well as holiday homes)

No, you dont need that 2nd or 3rd car.

Or that holiday home.

Just pay to rent on a as-when basis. This will save you soooooooo much when it comes to monthly maintenance, payments and interests.

Use your devices and cars longer

Instead of changing your phones every year, extend their use for 1-2 more years. Same goes for cars, you dont need to change your car every couple of years.

Packing food to work / eating home more often

I do enjoy the convenience of eating out or ordering in at times, especially when I’m tired but me/family need to eat right? Planning 1-2 steps ahead can help save you a lot of effort and time.

  • Packing food to work can be made simpler by choosing to cook meals that are more transferable to portable food. For example, grilled chicken can be dinner….as well as next day’s chicken sandwich.
  • Batch cooking can work wonders eg whenever I cook a meal, I cook 2-3 portions, and freeze the extra. On those days I’m tired, man, just reheating some pre-cooked food saves time and money. Flavourful too.

Make saving automatic*

This is one of my most underrated yet simple to do/use approach, which using your current bank.

  1. Create an additional digital bank
  2. Set up a standing order / instruction for X amount to be “pushed” there every month after your paycheck
  3. Leave it be (a level up is that this amount goes straight into an investment account to invest into simple index funds)

 

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How to create $1000+/month passive income from stocks

Have I told you that one of my greatest and favorite stuff in the world is receiving passive income?

  • dividends from businesses I own
  • dividends from dividend stocks such as REITs
  • dividends from crypto investments / staking
  • rental income

Wherever it comes from, it’s STILL DELICIOUS lol.

Anyhoo, there are 2 general ways to create this form of passive income.

  1. One, is the way I mentioned above: buy or build specific assets that pays me like clockwork OR
  2. Buy stocks that appreciate in value and then sell % of the appreciation at specific intervals

I like #1 better, simply because it’s more passive (yes, I like it convenient and easy that way) — the dividends go straight into my bank account. No need to open my brokerage account, select specific stocks and amount to sell.

In this article, I’m looking specificly at dividend stock investing. Dividend stocks are public listed companies that prioritize paying out a portion of their profits every single year

Go back to fundamentals

I’ll repeat this concept again and again and again: fundamentals are foundational stuff. Questions to go through when you go through selection of dividend stocks are:

  1. Is the business profitable?
  2. Do you expect they will be around in 10 years?
  3. Does this new sale price reflect a more accurate value of the stock?
  4. Are their dividends sustainable?

Is the business profitable?

Go to the company’s profit and loss statements where you can see clearly if they’re making profits or not. Because these company stocks are public listed, all the information is available for free.

They need to be

  1. profitable
  2. sustained profitable amount year on year for last 5 years at least

Do you expect they will be around in 10 years?

These is more of a general sense and decision making. Ask yourself if you think they’d be around in 10 years time or if they’d go obsolete? Companies that cannot grow or pivot such as Nokia, Kodak, Blockbuster. They didn’t adapt or change, so they were phased out.

Is the company you’re gonna invest for dividends in, gonna be around for 10 years or more?

Think about their business model, such as

  • Consumerism: Coca cola / Pepsi
  • Real estate investment trusts / real estate
  • etc

If yes, then you can consider

Does this new sale price reflect a more accurate value of the stock?

The market, or we can name him “Mr Market”, can be moody, with lots of mood swings. And sometimes it doesnt make sense, we’d think bad news, price of shares goes down, but sometimes it goes up. Sometimes with good news, price goes down. Who know how to anticipate that?

However, after looking at their past profitability level and if they may last more than 10 years, another way to go is to dive into their books and look for this thing called NAV and PTB, which means Net Asset Value and Price to Book. Simply means, other than the company generating revenue through it’s operations and business, we go with “just” their asset.

Say a company has $10M in assets, and the price to book should reflect at least their asset value. This hadnt factored in their revenue and profit generation activities…and sometimes (pay attention to this), the market moves so weird that

The price of a share is LESS than their net asset value and profit.

Here is what I call discounted or sales on share prices, especially when the company is a well known, good or have been performing for the last 5+ years. Hey, I did say sometimes the market does what the market does, even when the company didnt do anything different or bad or even good.

Invest regularly (dont time the market)

I’m dumb, so I try my best to NOT time the market.

I just go through the selection like I wrote about above, and every month, I have X amount of dollars to invest (usually 20% of all income goes into investment), and this X dollars is split equally into all my dividend stocks.

That’s it folks, nothing sexy to see, just invest and work/live/play on.

Until I hit my dividend goal, then I keep going. In fact, I’d also reinvest 20% of my dividends too (gotta keep it consistent).

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How to profit in a market crash

Recognize market crashes as one thing: awesome sales season

I’ve always wondered how interesting it was, that when share prices drop, “investors panic”…

Funnily, I think if my favorite phone maker’s phone prices drop, I would scoop up a new one and enjoy it at a discount, rather than sell my existing phone at a loss…correct?

I think investors who panic and quickly sell, aren’t really investors. They probably are either

  • speculators + day traders who “always want quick profits”
  • inexperienced investors who dont have an investing strategy and philosophy

Go back to fundamentals as an investor

  1. Keep saving up extra money every month from your career, business or investments
  2. Keep a close eye on a bunch of company shares whose business will likely be around for a long time and is profitable
  3. Ask yourself is the newly discounted price accurate or not? If it’s a good price and good company, then wont it be a buy decision?

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Why Warren Buffett is buying stocks RIGHT NOW

The answer is simple:

It’s because many good companies stocks are discounted now

His favorite saying is

buy good companies at fair price

And right now, in the midst of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that’s making a storm in the world’s politics, not to mention weaponry and even grains, it’s causing power uncertainties which trickle into the entire world.

People get scared and fearful, and they start selling their investments at discount and even companies’ businesses can be affected as well, so this causes share prices of good companies to tumble (even if the companies are doing okay).

The trick: good research + discount + long term hodl

In 1974, Warren’s company bought Washington Post shares at a deep discount during the financial crisis then. Without even factoring dividends, the purchase had returned more than 400X when it was acquired by Amazon for a sweet $250M.

There were 3 reasons why it worked:

  • Warren did his research: he knew the company is good
  • Discounted price
  • He wasnt looking for a quick flip – he would have made money too, but the fat stacks came with market recovery and growth of the business and market as a whole over a period of time

What does this mean for you?

We dont have as deep pockets as Warren, but we can learn a couple of things:

  1. Have a list of good companies that you had researched
  2. You can dollar cost average (ie buying every month or quarter or year)
  3. Hodl until it reaches the profit price you’re happy with (or live with the dividends)

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Now (2022) is the time to get rich

The best time to investments…

  • 1998 financial crisis
  • 2003 SARS virus crisis
  • 2007-2009 financial crisis
  • 2020 – 2022 COVID crisis
  • 2022 – present post-COVID + Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

Everytime there is a crisis, not only do people die and suffer (especially in wars and viral endemics like SARS and COVID), but the market’s sentiment tends to tank. Prices of property typically drops in the early stages, followed by public listed shares.

People get scared, and they…

Sometimes lose their jobs, opportunities or health. Sometimes fear grip them too much, and

  • they sell their investments in discounts for cash
  • they hold their cash from buying investments

These actions can drop the prices of the properties and shares, and here is the time that you can buy fair to good investments for discounted prices.

We’re not talking about a few bucks here and there, but millions and millions of dollars in discount, wherever you go.

Scary shit…but scary times can make good buys

You do have to research into the investments you want to buy – you can’t buy bad stuff for cheap and expect them to become good stuff. Bad investments remain bad ones. What you’re on the lookout for as an investor is to

Buy good companies at fair (discounted) price.

That sums up what I’m saying for this season of investing.

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3 reasons that makes real estate investing sexy

Leverage

One of the most powerful thing about property or real estate investing is that you can harness the power of leverage; also known as “debt”. Banks and financial institutions looooooooove property, so they’re often very willing to loan you money to finance your property purchase. How much they can (and will) loan you will depend on

  • how much net earning and debts you have
  • the value of the property

They will be willing to loan you more based on the % of the value of the property.

Practical: people gonna live some place

Rental properties aren’t some complicated rocket science stuff.

  • People will need a place to live
  • People will need a place to work

That pretty much sums up rental property investing. Of course you will need to consider nuances such as size, location and amenities etc, but those 2 points above is key.

Tax benefits (depending on your country)

This one can be tricky, depending on your country’s tax laws, and since I’m no accountant nor lawyer, I cannot advise on this. But there are often tax breaks and incentives, that’s tied to mortgage loans that you can consider; as well as expenses that you can attribute as legit (of course it needs to be legit eh) business expenses.

Bonus Point: refinancing magic

One bonus point on refinancing is this: if your property increases in value (they call this capital appreciation), you can actually “pull” out the value in cash by refinancing your mortgage loan…and use the money to buy another rental property. This is on top of rental markets going up and you not only get more rental yield too. Nifty huh.

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5 pains of real estate investing to consider before investing in your first real estate

There is no doubt that many, many people loooooooooove real estate and property – I’ll share the upsides of property investing in another post. Today, I’ll share 5 pains of property investing, and they are:

High upfront costs

Here in Singapore, to buy a property, it’s one thing that properties here are not that cheap – we have government flats that are hitting $1M in price; and private properties are often above $1M depending on the size and location.

To start off, you need to fork out a deposit of 20%, so that’d mean for a $1M property, you need to have at least $200K in cash and/or CPF; and that’s assuming you can get a bank to loan you for the remaining $800K. That’s why not many people are buying more and more properties (at least in Singapore).

Not liquid

Another term for this is “illiquidity”, which means that you cannot sell your house in one day. If you want to sell your house, it’d take weeks if not months to complete the sales process, and at least 3 months after before the money gets banked into your bank account.

Risk of problem tenants

If you’re the one living in it, then this is not an issue…but as landlords, facing problem tenants is bread and butter part of the program. You may get squatters who dont want to leave your home, or people who trash your home. Imagine if your tenant’s 2 months security deposit is a small, pale comparison to the massive damage done to walls, kitchens and toilets.

My mum had her rental home in Seremban slightly trashed by a nasty tenant who decided to break her basin and went missing on us.

But if you’re in the business of landlording, it’s nothing new, just sort it out or get your property manager to sort it out for you.

Maintenance hassle

Things break down in the house, such as

  • pipe leaks
  • stuck toilet
  • air con spoil
  • fridge spoil
  • gas leak
  • wiring

So many matters that can break, will break with normal wear and tear.

Associated expenses and fees

There are a number of expenses and fees that are associated with landlording:

  1. rental income tax
  2. property tax
  3. agent fees (rental, sales or purchase)
  4. legal fees
  5. stamp duty
  6. maintenance

I prefer something more hands-off

I lean towards more passive income investments such as dividend stocks and index funds that pay me a good % dividends or growth every year, that’s typically banked straight into my bank account. All I do is open my bank account and go “oh, got dividends!” lol =)

But that’s my personal preference.

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