Child Development Account (CDA) Comparison

So we have a baby and since Standard Chartered has this priority banking feature for the whole family, i thought let's sign up the whole family to be under the scheme and along with it came the Standard Chartered Child Development Account (CDA). A few weeks later, they announce they were exiting this business which coincidentally, many local banks started to come up with a slew of promotions to entice one to sign up for their CDA accounts.

POSB CDA 

UOB CDA

OCBC CDA

Summary

POSB - 5 year guarantee of 2% pa for first $12,000 and 0.05% pa, thereafter.

UOB - 1.7% pa for first $20,000 amd 2 % thereafter.

OCBC - 2% pa for first $36,000 and 0.05%pa thereafter.

Seriously, UOB can go fly kite, since who in their right mind will put in so much money to be locked up in a CDA account just to reach that "promotional" 2% pa.  For a single baby family, the optimum amount to put in will be $12,000 ( i place in $6000 + the maximum government matching of $6000). POSB and OCBC is similar for the optimal amount but i went for POSB instead for their transparent guarantee of 5 years.

Thankfully, the process to switch CDA account was painless and surprisingly quick as our fabulous government made it easy to switch online through this link.

Time to look for a breast pump as the hand me down medela swing ( this only pumps one breast at a time) took more than one freaking hour to use, which makes Wifey very frustrated which results in a not that great time for the Hubby. Buy a double pump one(pumps two breasts concurrently) instead as it takes half the time. 

The Stock Market Bugger and Portfolio

The recent correction revived my interest in the stock market with some deployment of my hard-earned war chest. Since my last post in December 2014 about the US interest rates, i am getting ready for it by first repricing my home loan to the DBS FHR (1.1%+FHR, no lock-in) and boy was i in the nick of time as they increased it the next day to (1.5% +FHR, 3 years lock) which is no longer attractive in the market currently(UOB 1.68% is better now,imo). My home loan has effectively decreased from about 2.1%(1 month +1 month sibor) to 1.5% currently.

The second thing i did was to sell half of my capmalltrustbonds3.05% at a price of $1.05 (acquired during IPO) immediately after the interest was given. The original intention was to sell all of it but given the current sub-IPO price of about $0.993 with some interest having accrued, heck it, as there is still some uncertainty about when interest rate will rise since US inflation is still pretty low. Selling this was to bolster my warchest to whack the sunken stock market bugger real hard if it ever becomes a 2009 crisis but i doubt it.

The third thing i did was to buy shares, namely, UOB,OCBC, Stamford land, Ireit, Accordia, ST Engineering, Jardine C&C, Keppel and M1. Having experienced the 2009 crisis, learning and profiting from it, i bought the shares 1 lot ( yes 100 shares each time) as it tanks...the more it tanks i increased it to 2,3,4,5 lots, capping my purchase to a max of 5-7K each day to pace my warchest. Having to pay only 0.18% commission with no minimum allowed me to do that. The cold comfort of Wee Cho Yaw buying UOB at about $22 and $18.76 per piece and OCBC's discounted DCA price of $8.71 gave me a benchmark to work with and heck, these bank shares price/book has been the lowest in 5 years with the former giving 4.6% dividend yield and the latter 4% dividend yield. Having ST Engineering director buy STE at about $2.75 with its dividend yield of 5.6% makes me shake off any losses i get hit with as i average down. I try not to average up, only average down, so the purchases came to an end with the recent bullish state of the stock market, leaving me with 2/3 of my warchest still languishing in high-yield bank accounts, namely, ocbc360 and CIMB. 

$14580 per annum of passive income from bonds and equity ( non-CPF). The journey of a trillion miles continues.