Free lance tutoring as a business - Part 3

Cash flow. This business is all about cash flow. In fact, shall I say all business is about cash flow? You can boost about how high your revenue growth is, but without actual cash flowing into your coffers, the revenue you noted down might not be translated to actual money. And we have to pay our bills with money, not with revenue. Here's a few key issues to think about: 1. Variability of cash flow 2. Recognition of income 3. Cash flow management Unlike...

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The Lesson from the Death of an Ant

Recently, I made acquaintance with a long time student of mine that I taught way back in 2006. He had since become a private tutor like me. Back then he was a chubby kid who is bright and always very inquisitive. I met him up this year for lunch and we kept in contact ever since. He’ll sometimes text me to ask for my feedback and advice on stuff related to students and work in general. All in all, a nice feeling to this because I see that I did...

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Free lance tutoring as a business - Part 2

Revenue is not the main thing we should be looking at. Afterall, not all the revenue you earned is going all into your pockets because there is cost involved. Revenue, after all the costs had been deducted, becomes the profit. And that's what we're looking at in this post. I like to see myself as a company. What I earned for a living is my revenue, while all that I spend are the cost of earning that revenue. So what's left after all the costs...

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Free lance tutoring as a business - Part 1

The more I understand how to valuate a business as an investor, the more clearly I can see what makes a good company from a bad. I think some of these skills can be applied to myself since you can say I'm also doing a business as a self employed, being a full time tutor for about 10 years. I'm not a business owner in the sense that there is a system where I can hire people without me having to teach, but more like a sole proprietorship. Think of...

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The bite into the forbidden fruit

Today marks a significant milestone in my life. It marks the first week since my transition from digital wasteland, to digital wonderland. It’s been 7 years since I last bought a brand new mobile phone, and my last phone attest to the suspension of time. The Nokia E71 was the vanguard during its times, but is now a vagabond that is relegated to a relic. It witnesses the rise of the smartphones, and the fall of the very company that birthed it. Its...

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What will you grab before your house burns down?

What will you grab from your home if you have 2 minutes before your whole house gets burned down? I watched this interesting clip on Youtube, called Tiny House Nation. It's a sneak preview of this particular episode 5 in season 1, where a couple had their house burned down to ashes. The husband was away but the wife was at home when it happened. When she realised that the fire cannot be put out, she had to rush within minutes to grab literally...

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Not YOLO, it's YOLLO.

I was reading 15HWW post on Hedging against a Short life. It's a great article and a good defence against those YOLO people who argued that because WOLO (we live only once), we should spend our money without care and worry. I think philosophically, it's a good idea, but it fails on the execution part. I think the key point is that we should spend on things that matters to us, not necessarily things that are the most expensive or the most extravagant,...

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Compound effect of our choices

Compound interest doesn't only work on money. It works on everything that we choose to do, which includes all the good choices and the bad choices. Compounding works on this equation: Taken from WikiHow link here. Not all the decisions that we make have the same interest rate. Some decisions are trivial and these compound at a lower interest rate. Yet other decisions are heavier, incurring a much heftier interest rate. If you have to make...

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The slum master's achievement

I was furiously typing on my desktop when my wife pops in. Actually, her head pops in first with a jubilant smile on her face. She's beckoning me to follow her to the living room, specifically the dining table where the 'slum' is situated. The slum is what I called the part of the home where I have no jurisdiction and you have no order. Work stuff lay at odd angles to each other, with files and books stacked like a cheap and quick imitation of the...

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Croesus rights allocation is out

A quick update before I start work. The rights allocation for Croesus is out. I haven't got the refund of money yet in my bank account and to check how many rights you're allocated, just go to CDP site here, log in (hopefully you've got all the password and token access) and check how many rights you have. I have 10,000 shares of Croesus and I have 13,100, so I know my entitled amount is 2,200 and excess is 900 shares. Since I have full rounding, I'm pleasantly surprised to see that I have excess. Not too bad at all. My strategy for the rights...

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Saizen reit - the strange beast

This is a strange beast. You would have expected that because there's a stated acquisition price of $1.172, the price of Saizen reit would have traded closer to that price as arbitrators close in to profit from it. But the price jumped to 1.09 from 0.925/0.930 expectedly, then went to a high of 1.14, before lingering around the 1.10/1.12 range and closing at 1.10 for Monday. If you buy in at 1.12 for example, you would easily have made 0.05 cts,...

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Real investor (in pref shares), real returns!

Real investors, real returns! I had the honour of handling my parent's retirement portfolio, otherwise known as LP bond fund 1, 2 and 3, starting from around 2013 to the most recent early 2015. In it, I bought several lots of preference shares by OCBC. It's the perp that I blogged about earlier here, paying a coupon yield of 4.2% pa and they are going to be redeemed soon in 2nd December 2015. One good thing about investing in bonds is that you...

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