{"id":12253,"date":"2025-08-20T03:08:59","date_gmt":"2025-08-20T03:08:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tonylaw.com\/wwwroot\/wp\/?p=12253"},"modified":"2025-08-20T13:23:05","modified_gmt":"2025-08-20T13:23:05","slug":"personal-finance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.tonylaw.com\/wwwroot\/wp\/2025\/08\/20\/personal-finance\/","title":{"rendered":"Personal Finance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"1024\" src=\"http:\/\/www.tonylaw.com\/wwwroot\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/img_0398-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12252\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.tonylaw.com\/wwwroot\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/img_0398-1024x1024.jpg 1024w, http:\/\/www.tonylaw.com\/wwwroot\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/img_0398-300x300.jpg 300w, http:\/\/www.tonylaw.com\/wwwroot\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/img_0398-150x150.jpg 150w, http:\/\/www.tonylaw.com\/wwwroot\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/img_0398-768x768.jpg 768w, http:\/\/www.tonylaw.com\/wwwroot\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/img_0398-1536x1536.jpg 1536w, http:\/\/www.tonylaw.com\/wwwroot\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/img_0398.jpg 2000w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Made a major accomplishment a couple of weeks ago. I finally made my first ever financial investment after a long studying period (2-3 weeks) and after some self-conducted research (another week) and after overcoming some minor technical difficulties in setting up the investment account! What did I buy for my inaugural self-directed investment? Just some shares of an ETF that included all the major Canadian banks. I figured that it\u2019s an improvement from investing in GICs because it offers higher interests (dividends to be exact and that is better in terms of tax) and better liquidity without needing to be locked in for long periods of time. The risk should be relatively low I think, what are the odds of all the major banks collapsing?!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>After making my first ever investment, I continued to log on my brokerage account daily to make additional investments and check on their performances. After less than two weeks of a few hours a day, I\u2019ve finally used up about 70% of the funds given by my parents to buy roughly 8 stocks, mostly bonds and ETFs that are relatively low risk and pay decent dividends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Having my personal finances settled was a big relief.  The fear I always had was being the servant in the Bible parable who dug a hole in the ground and buried all his master\u2019s money.  He was seriously scolded by Jesus for being an unfaithful servant.  Having made the investments gave me the peace of mind that I wasn\u2019t wasting away the money that was entrusted to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>With my personal finances more or less sorted out, I can now finally shift gear to set up my sustainable design studio here in TO.  Hope that I can be a faithful steward of God\u2019s gracious gifts to do good works.  <strong><em>May God bless my upcoming endeavors. <\/em><\/strong>\ud83d\ude4f\ud83c\udffb<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Made a major accomplishment a couple of weeks ago. I finally made my first ever financial investment after a long studying period (2-3 weeks) and after some self-conducted research (another week) and after overcoming some minor technical difficulties in setting up the investment account! What did I buy for my inaugural self-directed investment? Just some [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[2,145,340,333,142,90,219,59],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tonylaw.com\/wwwroot\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12253"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tonylaw.com\/wwwroot\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tonylaw.com\/wwwroot\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tonylaw.com\/wwwroot\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tonylaw.com\/wwwroot\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12253"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.tonylaw.com\/wwwroot\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12255,"href":"http:\/\/www.tonylaw.com\/wwwroot\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12253\/revisions\/12255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tonylaw.com\/wwwroot\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tonylaw.com\/wwwroot\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tonylaw.com\/wwwroot\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}