In a blink of an eye, we are almost halfway towards the year and I think it is quite an appropriate time to do a review of what has been set out as objective at the start of the year.

My youngest son is already 4 months old (having born in the same year same month same day as fellow blogger LP's son) and I am happy seeing him grow happily and healthily and soon enough will be able to play with his elder brother, who's already 3 years old plus now.

As part of the annual exercise, I wrote an objective that I wanted to achieve in 2017 towards the end of last year. For easy reference, I have re-pasted the link here.

Let's go through the objectives one by one.

Half Yearly Verdict: I set myself a pretty lofty goals to achieve a $600k networth by the end of 2017. Expenses this year was rising due to the birth of my second son and I expect cashflow to remain very tight in the household. The bull market we have this year has helped to alleviate the situation as the portfolio has gained a respectable return this year such that I have achieved this goal already by mid year which was way beyond my expectations. I'm just going to maintain this goal by the year end and not increase the expectations at this point. I'm also aware that any reversal in market performance will result in a reversal in my own performance.

Verdict: Pass

Half Yearly Verdict: Up until the 2nd quarter, I have received $15,142 dividend income thus far so that left me with a target of $8,858 to achieve in the second half of the year.

I think I'll manage to hit this as Aug tends to be a bumper dividend months where most of the companies are paying interim. Unless I'm cashing out for the profits, I think this should be achieved this year.

Verdict: Pass

Half Yearly Verdict: I've successfully build up little bricks at a time on both my children's portfolio and I will be updating them soon as I have made changes by switching companies from ST Engineering to Singtel. I'll update them together with mine in the next portfolio update.

I'll add to it again sometime in Aug when they receive their final dividend from Singtel.

Verdict: Pass

Half Yearly Verdict: Thus far we have chalked up to about 150,000 krisflyer miles so far using primarily the Citi Premier Miles as we tend to almost charge all our expenses (other than dining) to the card, both locally and overseas. My wife is the main contributor as she uses the card for her personal business which needs to charge her expenses overseas.

We are traveling to Thailand in Dec but will be more likely to use the miles sometime next year to Taipei.

Verdict: Pass

Half Yearly Verdict: I received a few emails and requests from friends both offline and online on a few questions to get them started. While an email or a simple lunch meet-up are not going to be comprehensive, I hope it generates some sort of interests in personal finance that each and everyone of us have to take responsibility of.

Verdict: Pass

It's been a relatively good half yearly result in terms of all the objectives that I wanted to achieve this year. I hope I'm not seeing anything nasty surprises in the second half of the year that will dent any of the objectives but will also not put my guard down and getting complacent about it.

In terms of family, good meet-up with parents right now, and the two boys growing healthily, which puts importance above anything else.

Hope you had a good year too so far.

Thanks for reading.