4 years ago, when Mrs 15HWW wasn’t Mrs 15HWW yet, I cajoled her to sign up for the Philip Capital ShareBuilder Plan. I was still in school but she had already started working for about 2 years. Since she was saving a really big proportion of her salary then, I thought that allocating $600 a month to this plan was a better allocation of the money.

4 years on, with total injections of $28,200, we have finally sold the entire stake earlier this month for $30,785. A total return of about 9% and an annualised return of about 2.2%. To be honest, that’s really not very impressive and cash deposits wouldn’t have fared much worse.

But the poor returns wasn’t the main reason why we opted out of this plan. After all, 4 years is a relatively short time in the market. (I still can’t believe they referred to this ...