Moomin Valley

Personal Finance, Investing, and Economics

Sunday, March 31, 2024

Got HIH Refund

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Today I received three cheques in the mail from the Reserve Bank. Here is one: They are my payout from the collapse of HIH back in 2001 . It...
Friday, March 15, 2024

Australian Unity Sells Diversified Property Fund

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After a couple of failed attempts at merging the Diversified Property Fund with other funds, Australian Unity has decided to rid itself of...
Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Capital Calls

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So, as soon as I had increased the cash buffer i n our offset account, I got AUD 40k of capital calls, so back to square one again. The capi...
Sunday, March 10, 2024

The Baseline Matters When Computing Long-run Investment Performance

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I am expecting my rate of return over the last 20 years to look bad this year because 2004 was such a good year. In 2004 I gained 42.4% comp...
Tuesday, March 05, 2024

February 2024 Report

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In February, the Australian Dollar fell from USD 0.6595 to USD 0. 6504 . Stock indices and benchmarks performed as follows (total returns in...
Sunday, March 03, 2024

Life Insurance and Cash Buffers

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This post follows up on EnoughWealth's comments on my previous post on Ramit's Conscious Spending Plan. In that post, I commented ...
1 comment:
Saturday, March 02, 2024

IWT Conscious Spending Plan

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I like to watch Ramit Sethi's podcasts where he has an in depth discussion with a couple about their finances. These sessions usually ...
2 comments:

One of Our Venture Investments Goes Bust

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Expected that some or even many companies will go bust in this space. This is the first individual venture investment of ours that went bust...
Saturday, February 24, 2024

Checking in on the SMSF

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 We have now been running an SMSF for almost three years. How is it doing? The obvious benchmarks are our employer superannuation funds - Un...
Friday, February 23, 2024

Closed Two Investments

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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...
Wednesday, February 21, 2024

My Aunt's Legacy

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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...
Tuesday, February 20, 2024

When Does Our Investment Strategy Add Value?

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EnoughWealth wonders if our investment strategy only adds value under certain market conditions. As a first step let's look at when the ...
Monday, February 19, 2024

Lost Money Found

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Got an email from Commonwealth Bank that mentions their "Benefits Finder" button in the CommBank App. This can help you find missi...
Sunday, February 18, 2024

A 60/40 Australia-Oriented Passive Benchmark

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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...

VDGR

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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...

Does My Investment Strategy Add Value?

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

January 2024 Report

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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 ...
Saturday, February 10, 2024

Updating Target Asset Allocation

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  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...
2 comments:
Friday, February 09, 2024

Insurance Inflation

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  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...
Sunday, February 04, 2024

Big Moomin vs. Little Moomin

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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 ...

Individual Investment Performance 2023

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  To better understand our investment underperformance in 2023 let's dive into the returns on each individual investment. If we'd ma...
Saturday, February 03, 2024

Annual Report 2023

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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...
2 comments:
Tuesday, January 30, 2024

Projected Retirement Income

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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...
2 comments:
Sunday, January 21, 2024

How Much Investment Income Do We Need to Compensate for Inflation?

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  This chart compares the fitted investment income curve from my previous post about the "boiling point" with the monthly loss of...
Saturday, January 20, 2024

Further Update on Big Moomin's Account

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

When Was the Boiling Point?

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Interesting post from Enough Wealth on the "boiling point" when more of your gain in net worth comes from investment returns rathe...
Saturday, January 13, 2024

Bottom in Real Estate?

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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...
Monday, January 08, 2024

Contributions to Annual Return

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

Update on the Children's Portfolios

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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...
Tuesday, November 14, 2023

Scammed

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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...
1 comment:
Monday, October 30, 2023

Reducing Gas and Electricity Bills

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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...
Friday, October 27, 2023

Second Australian Unity Merger Plan Scuttled

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Australian Unity and Cromwell announce that their fund merger plan is cancelled . I wasn't very enthusiastic about the merger and so am...
Saturday, October 21, 2023

Moominmama's Taxes 2022-23

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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...

Moominpapa's 2022-23 Taxes

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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...
Monday, October 02, 2023

Good News from Pershing Square

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The SEC finally approved the registration of Pershing Square SPARC Holdings. I bought Pershing Square Tontine Holdings (PSTH) around $23. We...
Saturday, September 09, 2023

Why I Haven't Posted a Monthly Report Recently

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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...
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About Me

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mOOm
I'm an economist and an active investor and currently live in Australia. I'm a global investor though I focus on investments in the Anglophone world and particularly in Australia. This blog tracks investment performance and discusses personal finance, investing, and trading from an economic perspective. In the picture, Moomin is looking for treasure.
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