Financial Freedom SG

My wife and I just bought an EC launched on the 17th of August called for some strange reason, Lush Acres. They must be running out of names to call condos pretty soon. Luckily, it isn’t named something like H2O which is the sister development by the same developer just a stone throw away.

We know that the property market is hot and near its height of frenzy and it has umpteenth round of cooling measure.

We know that the next few years that there will be a bumper release of flats which will be completed and built as well as private condos whose owners can finally sell without the punitive stamp duties imposed as part of the cooling measures.

Also, interest rates are likely to go up soon when the Fed finally weans the US economy off its long dose of quantitative easing measures of pumping money to a stuttered economy still bruised by its excessive housing loan binge.

So why did we still take the plunge?

As part of the scenarios exercise, I have done up some calculations of our ability to foot the first 23 percent (including stamp fees, legal fees and what have you), to finance the housing loan up to kinda of nearly doomsday type of interest rates. Also projected sale amounts of what we will get if we were to sell our current HDB flat 3 years hence on the open market. We took a sale figure that is more than 20 percent below current prices.

And we calculated the cash amount we have to foot, on top of using our cpf, in such a worse case scenario based on the maximum price we jointly thought we could afford.

Then for good measure, we estimated the reserves that we will have left after buying the EC, and tallied our best guess of our expenses and income with the EC and the new housing loan  to project what could be our retirement kitty come the time we hit the age of our freedom from servitude. It met our target number for retirement.

We sort of had a plan in place. Guess that all the studying for economics, statistics and accounting plus the basic grounding in the financial industry helped with the projections. It made it easier to go in and not have nightmares later on.

Being lined up with a horrible ballot number as the 1017th to choose in a condo development with only 380 units, we thought that our chances will be slim.  And what is left would be those out of our tight budget which we are not prepared to deviate from.

Thus we bought the unit we could.

If you need a good property agent, I can recommend  you our agent who we thought was professional and good to work with.  She’s Wallis from ERA and you can get her contact by emailing me directly at lemizeraq at gmail.com