Financial Freedom SG

As a shareholder, sometimes eating out is also an exercise to find out more about how your shares are doing.

One of the companies under the company ‘Breadtalk’, this is a restaurant that is doing quite well in Singapore by all accounts.

Din Tai Fung is voted one of the world’s top 10 restaurants by New York Times. 

As standard of good restaurants here, there is inevitably a queue during meal times, so my wife and me found one at the Raffles City branch. We ordered what we wanted as we waited for a table. And unlike banks, there was the standard few seats to wait as the table is being cleared.

The food and service was impeccable. Fast, good and relatively affordable compared to some restaurants which charged high prices but fail to deliver. Their signature dish, Xiao Long Bao, is one to try, as is their fried rice, which is superb.

It seems that Breaktalk group is doing quite well, with its bakery business as well as the food court business doing brisk sales. Their marquee business must be the Din Tai Fung restaurants with inevitable long queues at their branches at Bishan and Raffles City.

As we were eating, I told my wife that the price of the meal is free as it was reflected in the rise of the share prices since we bought it as well as the dividends we received. Think it helped her become more willing to order a few more dishes.

I think I should invest in more such companies :)

The former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker recently remarked that the only financial innovation to improve society since 1980s is the ATM.

After visiting the POSB bank with my wife after lunchtime, I tend to agree with him. The long snaking queues are a ever present reminder that customer service for banks is more hot air than real. For an organisation that is earning millions and whose CEOs are invariably multimillionaires if not billionaires and this is the best they can come up with?

At good restaurants, they provide you with seats to wait comfortably while the tables are being cleared. If not, places with longer queues and better services will take down you number and give you a call when you may have a table soon.

Is that too difficult for the banks? Or are they too busy trying to make another buck or two?

During the bank visit, I saw the old, the infirm and people who came in, saw the queue and walked away.

If not for the ATM, I guess the queues will be even longer. Or maybe there will be more customer service with there being more tellers.

Anyway, poor service is not just limited to banks. I had a problem with my telecom provider, Singtel, as my internet and home line were both down. I managed to resolve the issue through troubleshooting with the internet services helpline. But the home line helpline was still engaged after 30 minutes of fruitless waiting.

Worse, there isn’t any help guide online. If your organisation cannot be bothered to man the lines with enough people, the least you can do is to provide pdf guides or self help FAQs to customers encountering problems.

The only thing that these organisations are interested in is to get more new customers, not servicing the old customers they already have.

If we are brave enough to invest in such companies, we should put aside a bigger margin of safety in case these companies take a big hit from their lack of customer service.

Do you have any pet peeves that you have regarding the lack of customer service encountered?

I read this article by Bad Money Advice’s Frank Curmudgeon about “The Truth About Mortgages” and I agree with what he says about stretching your housing loan to the maximum.

Whether you live in United States or here in tiny Singapore, the conclusion is the same.

If you borrow it at 2.6% for the HDB home loan here in Singapore or 2.48% after taxes in Frank Curmudgeon’s case, it will be possible to get a return higher than that low base rate. Just last year, my dividend returns on just the shares and ETFs were 2.2%. That’s not counting the returns for unit trust nor the returns from last year. If I had panicked and took out all my investment at the start of 2009 and ploughed it all back to my housing payment, I would be much worse off today.

And the fact of the matter is that there are investors out there who’s return are even better than mine. A fellow investment blogger, Musicwhiz, has dividends returns north of 3% and a very solid portfolio.

The question is then, are you prepared to change your mindset and weigh the pros and cons of paying off a housing loan later rather than earlier?

If you need further persuasion, an earlier article of mine, “Early House Repayment or Invest the Sum” will give you more food for thought. And if you have gotten this far in this article, you should go and do the sums for yourself to decide what your own position is.

Sometimes, investing needs you to do a fair bit of calculations and “what if ” scenarios to decide what is the best option for yourself. Paraphrasing what Gandalf said in Lord of the Rings, “All you have to decide is what to do with the money that is earned by you”