About

I'm Keith Lim. This blog will help you learn about personal finance and investing.

Some topics I cover include:

  1. Stock market investing
  2. How to think about starting a business
  3. General investing mindsets

I also write a finance and investing column for The Manila Bulletin. You can read it here: https://mb.com.ph/author/keith-lim

How This Blog Started

I originally got into finance and investing back in 2014, while I was in college studying industrial engineering.

I started with learning about budgeting, saving, and other basic topics. After a while, I also wanted to learn how to invest in the stock market. So, barely knowing anything about finance, I forced myself to read The Intelligent Investor, a legendary book by Warren Buffett's mentor, Benjamin Graham.

Graham advocates for treating stocks as businesses rather than lottery tickets, and he recommends buying during times of fear and selling during times of euphoria.

It was not an easy book. It took two full months of spending all my free time reading and referencing Investopedia.com to get through it. It was so hard that after finishing, I told myself: Stock picking is too difficult. I'll stick to index funds instead.

My personal copy. It’s a long read!

So for the next 6 years, I focused on other things for making money, from getting a corporate job to starting an e-commerce distribution business. Then in 2020, COVID hit, and remembering The Intelligent Investor, I thought to myself: Why don't I try this stock picking thing again? Markets are cheap right now!

So I bookmarked the 2019 undergraduate valuation Youtube playlist from Professor Aswath Damodaran, bought a bunch of textbooks, and committed to reading a hundred pages of finance and investing content every day for at least a year.

Those initial investments I made during COVID did well. And the rest is history.

Since I started, I would sometimes get questions from friends and family about how to manage their finances. I mainly write this blog so that when I get frequently asked questions or need to explain something difficult, I can link to these blog posts instead.

Hopefully this blog can help you as well. If this sounds like a fit, subscribe!