My Current Financial Status - Jan 10

The fall in securities negated the increase in income, so it is another flat month. I did manage to sneak in a few stock purchases, but as a co-worker likes to say, "I'm waiting for financial armageddon again to start buying".

I am doing some financial planning - on top of my usual "fun" stock investments, I believe this year I will be getting a new fund in my Roth IRA: Vanguard International Value (VTRIX), and will be contributing to a 529 plan for the little one.

My Current Financial Status - Dec 09

Happy new year!

A quick update on my financial status - looks like a stagnating month. Mainly due to a lower income due to going on paternity leave and getting slightly less pay, holiday expenditure (new camera, household items, etc) and my financial portfolio staying neutral.

New year resolution: Find passive income sources that can support my monthly expenses within 5 years

My Current Financial Status - Nov 09

In light of me being locked out of my kaching account, I am going to blog more about my financial life and thoughts here. To recap, my investment style so far as being investing small amounts at a time, and every month I do approximately 10 trades since I get 10 free commission trades from Zecco. Stock buys are made with limit order at prices that are priced using Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) and relative pricing models. While there are no guarantees I can fully utilize (or not exceed) the 10 free trades per month, I tend to average close to 10 buys a month.

As I only buy with available cash, I do not have to sell due to margin calls. Mint has an interesting visualization of net-worth trends. Even though I have been investing in the stock market since 2007, I only started using Mint since Oct 08. As a result, my financial information has only been available since last year.

I have been satisfied with my investment performance so far - with an average money-weighted annual return of 22% (includes the great recession of 2008). However, it is unclear to me if this is due to prudent investment strategies, or a case of a rising tide lifting all boats. Only time will tell.

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What I have learnt as a Journeyman

I have been working at Google for almost two years now. Google is a great place to work in - great benefits, outstanding colleagues and, well, a stable job in today's economy. And to think this all started with my wife applying for me on her own accord [see Making a career choice]. I have grown immensely as a software engineer, but there is still so much room to grow. Here are a few tidbits that I have picked up along the way:

Unit testing - when your code is live and serving traffic 24/7, it enables me to sleep better knowing that it is tested. The tests range from small (each library has unit tests for each individual function) to big (integration tests that the service can connect to all backends and work as intended). Using Mock objects helps to test environments in a controlled fashion. Unit-testing for failure conditions have saved production crashes in numerous occasions. [See Google Testing Blog]

Refactoring works. Especially with those nifty unit tests written to ensure everything works.

Code does smell, and at Google, it's usually my own first working implementation. Oh, wait, that's why refactoring works.

Mapreduce is my hammer - all nails shall tremble in its presence.

Patterns, paradigms and ideology are great, but don't let it get in the way of getting things done. Overengineering is your worst enemy.