Donavan Group Consulting in Singapore and Tokyo

A friend once asked me, “How do I start investing if I don’t have much money?” That is a legitimate question, especially for students just out of college or working adults who have just entered the corporate world. To answer my friend’s question, I jogged back my memory to recall out how I first started investing. I, too, didn’t have much money when I started my investing journey . I remember all I had was the monthly allowance given to me during National Service, which I had squirrelled away diligently. With the money I had, I invested in books on personal finance and stock market investing. I remember the first book I bought was Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. I also went for an investment course to help bring down the steep learning curve (I had no accounting or finance background from school). Essentially, what I did was to invest in myself. By investing in myself and not on a broker’s hot tip, I accumulated the knowledge needed to navigate the stock...

When it comes to preparing for retirement, 50 can be a pivotal age. At that age, most people are just 10 to 15 years away from leaving the workforce, and time is relatively limited to save for retirement. But with a decade or more of work still remaining, you have enough time to make changes to your retirement savings strategy to ensure you reach your savings goals. "Add up all of your life savings—your 401(k), your investments, the money under the mattress—and then divide that by 25. Could you live on that amount comfortably for one year?" asks David Rae, a certified financial planner and founder of DRM Wealth Management. "If the answer is yes, then you may be on track for retirement. If its no, it's time to sit down with a fiduciary financial planner to figure out what else you can do to secure your financial future ." Rae's formula of dividing by 25 is based on the assumption that people will withdraw about 4% per year from their retirement ...

Human beings are intelligent people, capable of making good decisions, weighing all options and making a rational and well thought out conclusion. However, sometimes it feels like we act irrationally without even realizing we are doing it. In some cases, our brains are hard wired or pre-dispositioned to behave in a certain way if our conscious mind does not take over and think rationally. Luckily, because of our conscious mind, we can override our natural evolutionary desire to act irrationally in certain instances. Here are 5 biases and fallacies that make us terrible with money and how we can overcome them. 1. Recency bias Recency bias occurs when we base on current or future behavior or outcome on what has happened in the recent past. Put differently, whatever is happening now, will also happen tomorrow and the day after. Recency bias occurs because of our flawed and selective memory. Most people’s memories are not as good as they think and much of what we do remember...