Here are my monthly financials for November 2022.
Top 3 Income Sources
Affiliate & Referrals – S$300
This month’s referral is actually S$325 but for easy calculation’s sake, I will shift S$25 to December.
If you still have not signed up for a Trust Bank account, you can check out how to get the sign-up rewards here.
Interest – S$279.32
This is from SSB, Singlife, Dash PET and T bill.
I withdrew all my Singlife and Dash PET and placed it into T Bill and Trust Bank as their interest has not caught up with the rising interest rate environment so this would be my last payment from them at the moment.
Merch Sales – S$85
I received US$62.99 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
Groceries – S$429.25
This is from buying groceries. Since I have the NTUC vouchers, the weightage of grocery buying fell more onto me or else I might have trouble finish using the vouchers by their expiry date.
Investment – S$200
S$200 of it is my monthly DCA into STI ETF using POSB Invest-saver.
Gift – S$160
This is for my friend’s wedding red packet.
CLL’s Infrequently Curated Videos
Catching Singapore’s Very Own ‘Tinder Swindler’
This scammer managed to scam over US$100,000 from multiple individuals using various schemes.
He needed money for his grandmother’s hospital bill and his debts so he looked for ways to earn money quickly and he came across scam techniques to trick close friends and relatives. It is unclear where he spent the money on.
He uses unbacked cheques to get the option-to-purchase papers for private properties along high-end areas like Orchard Road to put up the façade that he is a rich and successful person. The scammer also took photos of the properties to show off. He also rents different vehicles using his employee’s name every time he meets his victim to show that he is rich.
- Set up a shell company and made use of an employee to buy all the supplies for the company. He also eventually proposed to her but the wedding didn’t go through. He also asked his employees to sign up for mobile plans with the latest handphones on behalf of the company. He would then sell the phones and use the handphone lines for his own use and rack up bills for a few thousand dollars a month. Since the employees signed up the plans using their own names, they were stuck paying the bills. Employees also had to spend thousands to terminate these lines early.
- Collect a deposit to sell properties that he didn’t own.
- Get an individual to “invest” money with him as he can get better returns. He even managed to get the guy to take loans to invest with him. He then managed to convince the individual to hand over their banking details so that the scammer can make payments for him. The scammer withdrew all the money to his own account instead of investing or paying back the loans.
- The scammer managed to convince another individual to take the fall for him and made false police reports to fit his story.
- Forged medical documents to avoid going to court as his grandmother was ill
He claims that he is a changed person and regrets his actions but only time will tell.
SECRET vs TUNDRA – TI11 GRAND FINAL
This is the grand finals of the annual DOTA 2 competition and this year, it was held in Singapore. A fantastic series by Tundra, a relatively new team versus the seasoned veterans of Team Secret. Team Secret has no answer against the draft and gameplay of Tundra and Tundra won 3-0 dominatingly in a best of 5. Tundra lifted the Aegis and won US$8.5 million for their team while Team Secret got US$2.4 million for coming in second.
There Is A Racer Inside Every Hong Kong Bus Driver
This is in mandarin so I will do a brief summary of the video. This video talks about the culture revolving these mini-buses in Hong Kong. There are green mini-buses that are corporate-owned and regulated by the government with fixed routes, stops, timings and fees. There are also red mini-buses that are privately owned and the routes, stops, timings and fees can change at any time. These mini-buses are the superior transport when the MRT lines are still new as they are faster than normal buses and cheaper than taxis. At its peak, these mini-buses make up 28% of all public transport in Hong Kong.
Bus interchanges are controlled by triads so red buses have to pay protection money to enter these interchanges. If drivers refuse to pay, both driver and bus can be beaten up and harassed by these triads. In order to make back the protection money, these unregulated buses will do whatever it takes to increase their income by driving extremely fast, running red lights, weaving in and out of traffic and over-carrying passengers. Some of these buses drive over 100 km/hr. This is why these red buses are sometimes called death buses. For reference, taking normal public transport might take 1 hour 15 mins for a 20+km trip. However, if you take a red bus, it can be as fast as 25 minutes.
In 2009, there were 1,110 accidents, 21 deaths and 187 injured involving these minibuses. This is 8% of all accidents in Hong Kong while the minibus only makes up less than 1% of all vehicles. The government had to step in to regulate them by enforcing speed displays, limits and safety belts. Despite the crackdowns, the speed limits can be bypassed easily and these buses still exist in Hong Kong today.
Just how fast are RACE WALKERS walking?
Can you imagine someone walking faster than you run? Olympic walkers are crazy fast. The individual in the video has a 5KM walk time of 18 minutes 20 seconds. This is faster than the gold timing for our IPPT 2.4km. In this video, we will look at some of the techniques of race walking and see the huge difference between a fit individual is compared to an Olympic race walker.
I Played Facebook’s VR Metaverse so you never have to
This content creator visited FB/Meta’s Metaverse that cost US$15 billion. It not only looks bad but there are limited functions and plenty of bugs in it. The experience for the player is not great. There is also a tipping system where fb gets the tips instead of the person you are tipping. The comments were meme-ing that Facebook’s share price pummelled 30% after this video was published but it actually dropped a few days before the video was published.
The FTX Disaster is Deeper Than you Think
FTX has received lots of air time this money due to its sudden implosion and the story is still developing. For those not in the loop, FTX is the second biggest crypto exchange and they were over-leveraged. Binance’s (the largest crypto exchange) CEO somehow found out about FTX’s financials and twitted that they are dumping the native FTX token, FTT, which caused the price of these tokens to fall.
With many of the many defaults occurring this year, users also rushed to withdraw all their funds from FTX resulting in a bank run. With limited liquidity coupled with a falling token price, FTX declared bankruptcy.
There are also plenty of influencers and mainstream media that helped built the façade that the CEO of FTX, Sam is a down-to-earth, most generous billionaire that drives a crappy Toyota. However, we have screenshots that it is all an act and Sam is playing a character that is quirky and altruistic just to attract investments.
I am absolutely not doing the various videos justice so you would fare better by just watching the various videos if you are interested in the story. Here are some videos that you can look at. Take note that this is a developing story.
Established Titles Scam -YouTube’s BIGGEST Con!
You might have seen your favourite YouTubers being sponsored by Established Titles. This company supposedly sells you a small piece of land that gives you a lady/lord title while planting trees for every sale. However, this has been exposed as a scam. First, you cannot own the land. Second, you will not get the title. Last but not least, there is no proof of them planting the trees.
The content creator looked into the people behind this company and found out that there are also involved in other shady businesses like Deal Dash where individuals pay to bid for an item even when they do not win.
There are at least 50 huge YouTubers (millions of subscribers) that accepted this company as their sponsor. The content creator insinuates that a sponsorship is about US$20,000 a month per YouTuber (depends on the following). From what I know, many of these YouTubers signed a multi-month contract with Established Titles.
Established Titles have come out with their response and say that this is a false allegation. Some of these YouTubers have since came out and apologized and tried to mend things by donating all that they earned into legitimate reforestation efforts.
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.
