By Casiano Mayor Jr.
For almost a month now, I have spent most of my time, especially on Sundays, watching youtube tutorials on direct investing in stocks.
I have made two investments in mutual funds lately, one in an equity fund with the Soldivo Strategic Growth Fund and the other in an index fund with COL Financial.
Mutual funds are good for long-term investments of at least five years. They can’t make you earn immediately. I have opened my mutual fund with Solvido only last June and my COL Financial fund only this month.
The plan is to sink in P1,000 or more monthly for each fund and invest directly in the stock market with the hope that these could raise enough money to build an apartment that we could rent out to generate another source of passive income.
As of now, my wife and I have our pensions and a two-room studio-type boarding house that we rent out to augment the active incomes we earn from our carderia, a sari-sari store, and a small Smart Padala money remittance business.
Although our carinderia has enabled us to send our only child to college and our daughter was able to find a job a month after she graduated last year, we want to close it gradually as we find it to be getting strenuous as we grow older day by day.
That’s what drives me to invest in mutual funds and, hopefully, directly in the stock market as part of our endeavor to raise the money we need to build the apartment on a vacant lot beside our house in a span of five years or even less.
My exposure to financial literacy a year before my wife and I decided to go home in 2015 after our 16-year stay with our only child in Jeddah has made me realize the importance of creating passive incomes.
One advantage of being exposed to financial literacy is that you can grow your wealth and yet keep your old-school values from drowning in the strong undercurrents of the overwhelming materialist culture.
It has become easy for me, for instance, to cut on unnecessary expenses like not buying branded clothes or a new cellphone when I still have one in my conscious effort to save and make our savings grow.
Probably, some friends think that I have become obsessed with making money because of my investment-related posts over the past months but I haven’t really abandoned my passion for writing.
I still want to write, although I can feel that I have become rusty after a long hiatus since I stopped writing my weekly column, The Way We Live, with the Visayan Daily Star here in Bacolod four years ago as I found it difficult to write while tending our store cum carinderia.
If I appear to be on an earnest pursuit to make money, it’s because I am seeking a balanced life, a life in which, to borrow a cliche, I can keep body and soul together.
But I can only achieve that goal when I can gain my financial freedom, the liberty to do the things that I want to do without worrying about money.
I have known poverty and hard toil after my father died here in Bacolod when I was 13 and was taken by the family of my uncle to work on the farm in the backwater barrio of Ginablan in Romblon.
That spurred me to seek my stars in the cities after graduation from high school and, by God’s grace, was able to find a relatively comfortable life after working my way to college, first as a construction laborer and later as a security guard.
It is said that if you can’t find a way to make your money work for you, you will work for it for the rest of your life. With that warning in mind, I am trying to find ways to be able to do the things that I want to do until I find rest in my grave.