Moomin Valley

 We have now been running an SMSF for almost three years. How is it doing? The obvious benchmarks are our employer superannuation funds - Un...

I sold our holding in WAM Leaders (WLE.AX). It was down to only 0.1% of the portfolio. Once we held a lot more but gradually sold it off ove...

My aunt died in 2020. She was single all her life. My father and her did not get on well. They fought each other in court over their mother...

EnoughWealth wonders if our investment strategy only adds value under certain market conditions. As a first step let's look at when the ...

Got an email from Commonwealth Bank that mentions their "Benefits Finder" button in the CommBank App. This can help you find missi...

If we create a portfolio invested 50% in VDBA and 50% in VDGR we can simulate a 60/40 passive benchmark: This requires monthly rebalancing...

Following up on my comparison of our portfolio to VDBA , here is a comparison to VDGR . VDGR is a 70/30 mix, while VDBA is 50/50 and our por...

EnoughWealth commented on my recent post on our target allocation : "Have you tried benchmarking your actual and target asset allocati...

Monthly reports are back! In January, The MSCI World Index (USD gross) rose 0.61% while the S&P 500 rose 1.68%, and the HFRI hedge fund ...

  Not sure when I last posted about our target asset allocation, as I have tweaked it since this 2021 post . I am tweaking it again to refle...

  This year's home contents insurance bill is 70% higher than last year's! How does that make sense? The number I am comparing to is...

We have now re-invested Big Moomin's portfolio in the two suggested managed funds . At this point, Little Moomin has just over 8% more ...

  To better understand our investment underperformance in 2023 let's dive into the returns on each individual investment. If we'd ma...

In the second half of 2023 I stopped writing monthly reports on this blog because each month's accounts had large errors.* But now I hav...

If we retired today, how much would our retirement income be? To answer the question, I updated an analysis I did a few years ago and came u...

  This chart compares the fitted investment income curve from my previous post about the "boiling point" with the monthly loss of...

I recently posted about the returns on the children's portfolios . It looks like it would be complicated to transfer Big Moomin's po...

Interesting post from Enough Wealth on the "boiling point" when more of your gain in net worth comes from investment returns rathe...

Fundrise have come out and said that they think the bottom is in in the commercial real estate market. Coincides with my assessment that ma...

I haven't formally finalized the accounts for 2023 yet. I will need to wait to get investment returns on illiquid investments that repor...

I was calling our children Moomin and Baby Moomin on this blog. But the latter is no longer a baby, so let's call them Big and Little Mo...

I just got scammed for AUD 2,300. I got an email from my webhosting company saying that my card had expired and I needed to renew. Except it...

Today I received new format gas and electricity bills from ACTEWAGL which include a notice on the front page that we can reduce our bills by...

Australian Unity and Cromwell announce that their fund merger plan is cancelled . I wasn't very enthusiastic about the merger and so am...

I also did Moominmama's taxes for this financial year. The post about last year's taxes is here . Here is a summary of her tax retur...

This year, I've prepared our tax returns just before the deadline. Here is a summary of my taxes. Last year's taxes are here . To ma...

The SEC finally approved the registration of Pershing Square SPARC Holdings. I bought Pershing Square Tontine Holdings (PSTH) around $23. We...

I haven't posted monthly reports for July or August. The reason is that the July accounts have an error of more than AUD 12k and I don...

I just found these great personal finance videos . I know most of this stuff, but lots (most?) of people could learn a lot from this!

Closed my Paypal account. Only time it ever comes up is when someone is trying to scam me. Just had someone try to charge USD 599 to me.

In Australia, if you don't get private health care when you are younger, if you finally do get it you have to pay an extra "loading...

We finally have all the investment statements and reports for the 2022-23 financial year, which means I can put together a report on our inv...

Following up from my post on how our SMSF is performing compared to our managed superannuation funds, here is how our superannuation in ge...

Inspired by this article in the AFR, here is an update on how well our SMSF is doing compared to Unisuper and PSS(AP). after underperformin...

I blogged recently about the proposed merger between the Australian Unity Diversified Property Fund and a Cromwell office fund. Today, I was...

Australian Unity Diversified Property Fun has a new merger proposal on the table following the failed merger in 2021-22 . This is a merger w...

For the last six years I've been putting together reports on our spending over the Australian financial year, which runs from 1 July to ...

Ramit Sethi advocates only tracking about four categories of spending and is critical of couples who do more fine-grained tracking . For the...