Interest rates for OCBC and UOB HYSA (high-yield savings account) are set to fall in May 2025, and interest rates for other safe investments like fixed deposits (FD), Singapore Savings Bonds (SSB), and T-bills have been falling over the past few months. As such, we have been researching how to build a long-term investment portfolio for our family. It is a work in progress, and we are constantly looking at diversifying our portfolio and adding funds to it whenever we have some spare cash.

Here’s what we have built so far –

Dividend

We wanted to have a passive income stream that could replace the interest that we previously received from our safe investments, such as FD and HYSA. Dividend stocks are the best way for us to do so without actively trading or selling the shares.

This carries some risks, such as the dividend received not covering the fluctuations (drop) in price of the shares or the dividend yield being cut due to external or corporate reasons. This is a very real risk as the market looks to be susceptible to volatile market conditions in the next few months or years.

Pertaining to this dividend portfolio, we are adopting a “buy-and-forget” mentality, and we do not intend to actively review or trade this portfolio. As such, we are only buying into blue-chip stocks that can hopefully weather extreme market conditions. Mainly, the stocks that we currently hold are Singapore bank stocks – OCBC, UOB and DBS shares.

At current share prices and past dividend history, we can expect to receive up to 5.x% in dividend yield. However, we also expect the dividend yield to be cut due to market conditions.

More details of our dividend portfolio can be found here.

Cryptocurrency

Disclaimer – cryptocurrency carries very high risk, and we only put in money that we can afford to lose. Cryptocurrency is a very risky investment and this is a very small part of our investment portfolio. Do only invest in cryptocurrency if you know what you are doing.

Cryptocurrency is a very volatile market that can see swings in price upwards and downwards of 50-100% and more within hours. We avoid these and only invest in Bitcoin (BTC). Main rationale – cryptocurrency is here to stay, and while there are hundreds and thousands of coins, Bitcoin is the leader of cryptocurrency, and people associate cryptocurrency = bitcoin.

We may end up losing it all, but we feel that given a long enough time frame, having some exposure to Bitcoin in our investment portfolio would give us some unexpected surprises. For this position in cryptocurrency, we may sell them if we deem that they are too volatile. But right now, having a starter position in cryptocurrency allows us to be exposed to cryptocurrency.

US Stocks

Given the volatility in the market, we feel that the current market conditions give us good discounts to good stocks that we can look to accumulate in our investment portfolio. The market seems to be going down, and we do not know if it will fall further. However, as our timeframe is very long, we are willing to accumulate good stocks, so long we think it is good value.

Most likely, we would be doing dollar-cost-averaging (DCA) on name stocks, and we will be holding them for the long term. We do not intend to “time” the market, nor do we think we have the ability to do so. Hence, DCA as our strategy allows us to slowly buy in stocks without being sensitive to price or the fluctuations.

Gold and Silver

This is probably the boomer brain in us, but we do think it is a good idea to buy some gold and silver for safekeeping. We do not mean it in the literal sense of stashing gold bars or silver at home (but you do you). What we refer to are the gold and silver shares that are listed in the market.

This will probably be a very small part of our overall investment portfolio, but it acts as a little hedge. Based on our research, gold and silver tend to move in tandem with the US currency. In addition, it is an investment that has lesser volatility compared to the stock market and cryptocurrency market, and we do not anticipate the investment value to move too much.

Last Words

This is the investment portfolio that we are actively taking steps to build along the way. Honestly, it is a little daunting to move our money stash to build an investment portfolio as we are very used to doing investments with low to little risk. Unfortunately, the available options are no longer giving us good returns, and it is not as worthwhile as it used to be.

Additionally, we were already thinking of building an investment portfolio for our kid that we can slowly accumulate over the years, and interest rates dropping exponentially this year simply kickstarted the engine earlier.

Again, these are our rudimentary thoughts and plans, and as we deep dive further, the portfolio may change again.

Let us know if there’s any good investment to look at as well!

Last Updated: 17 Apr 2025