Here are my monthly financials for April 2022.
It is good to keep track and review your monthly financials so you can be in control of your finances.
Having a fixed income and knowing my expenses will not exceed my budget allowed me to not track my expenses before I left my job. I did not feel a need to track my finances strictly as I know I can control my spending. I only tracked my investments diligently.
Since I will not have a fixed source of income soon, I decided to start tracking my financials starting from January 2021. Money will be tight so I need to be extra prudent. This also helps generate content for my website.
Top 3 Income Sources
Dividends – S$134.36
These are dividends from DBS and AIMS APAC REIT.
Interest – S$78.38
This is made up of the coupon payments from Singapore Savings Bond and interest from Singlife and Dash PET.
Merch Sales – S$64
I received US$48 worth of commissions from selling merch on TeePublic and Redbubble. If you like to find out more about selling merch, you can look at an article I wrote here.
Top 3 Expense Sources
Investment – S$200
S$200 is my monthly DCA into STI ETF using POSB Invest-saver.
Groceries – S$27.83
This is for groceries at NTUC and Giant.
Food – S$27.83
This is for food.
CLL’s Infrequently Curated Videos
The TRUTH About Coffee Pods
Coffee pod companies have taken a leaf from the printer industry’s book. They have started to make their pods exclusive to their machines so you are unable to get any third-party pods to work on your machine. This is in line with the subscription model that companies are utilizing to get a larger lifetime value out of their customers. They get to sell you the machine PLUS coffee pods till the day the machine breaks down. However, as of now, users are able to bypass the DRM system and just reuse an old cap on a third-party pod so that it will also work. The marketing message that the pods will be recycled is all a façade and just made to appeal to the environmentally conscious. Only a small fraction of the pods will be recycled.
Leaked Meta Document explains the focus of their Metaverse
A piece of Meta’s presentation material has been leaked, showing what they will be trying to do with it. It all boils down to advertising income. You will be a walking billboard for brands when you purchase your avatars for the metaverse, not unsimilar to real life. Businesses will then be able to harness the Metaverse platform to grow their businesses by advertising in it. Based on the current tech, the Metaverse will mainly be focused on big businesses as only they will be able to afford the kind of tech the metaverse requires.
Basically, 2D Facebook ads will become 3D. If you are still using Facebook or Instagram, just count the number of ads on your feed. I looked at my mum’s feed and about 1 in 4-5 posts are sponsored posts. And out of the remaining posts, some of them are organic ads as the platform is rife with businesses masquerading as entertainment (influencers, livestream), trying to sell you something.
What Games Are Like For Someone Who Doesn’t Play Games
We take many things for granted when we are used to a product and we do not think about how new users look at a product. In the video, we look at an individual that has little to no experience in games. Things that we assume are obvious are actually not obvious. It is obvious to us as some of us have been “trained” for many years so we know that certain things are to be expected. The “non-gamer” will use their own perspective to try to solve something in a “non-gamer” way. The game doesn’t take that into account and it is harder for a new user to take up the game. This shows us two things. It is valuable to have people from different backgrounds on a team as we will have different perspectives on how to tackle a problem. Next, we need to take into account how people view new things and instructions need to be clear and easy to follow for someone who has zero experience.
60 Thousand Fans VS Ecommerce Slashing Promotion
This video is in mandarin but I will summarize it here. An ecommerce site has a marketing campaign where an individual is able to share a product with their friends and they will be able to “slash” a product to bring the price down. A live streamer decided to try it out with his thousands of fans. With thousands of fans slashing his shared link, they are only able to slash it to a certain point. This shows that first, it is impossible for the ordinary user to participate due to the limited social circle, next, the campaign is hardcoded to make it near impossible to claim the rewards. The company also attempted to close off the issue by giving the streamer a voucher to purchase the product for 1 dollar.
Futuristic A.I. Turns Text into Astonishing ART [Dall-E 2]
This AI is able to turn text into creative art. Through machine learning, it is able to generate images that it thinks appeal to humans. The AI is able to select the colour palette, composition and subject to generate an image by itself. Some artists say that their jobs might be in jeopardy as the images generated are really high quality. However, this can be used as a tool for artists to generate ideas too. This tool will lower the barriers to entry for anyone who wants to get into art or is someone who needs an art piece for low costs. There is also an issue of abusing the AI to generate images of popular figures to create controversy. To combat this, the code of the AI disallows generate violent, adult or political content. They have set up filters to detect texts or images that may violate their content policies.
Money Manager App
I am using an app called Money Manager to track my income and expenses. It is a free tool available on mobile available on Google Play Store and Apple App Store.
As far as I know, the data collected from the app is for tracking the ads you view and interact with on the app.
Please check out their privacy policy on what information they collect and what is it used for.
Personally, the value this app brings to me outweighs the value of the information I provide to them.
