Posted on April 4, 2010 - by Tan Kin Lian

Poor financial future for Singaporeans

Tan Kin Lian

I feel sad for the people of Singapore. Most of them work hard and are frugal. They save for their future and for their children. But, when they come to retire, you do not have enough savings and are asked to continue to work longer.

What went wrong? Most of them get a poor deal from the financial products that they invested in. Take an example of a family which saves $500 a month over 35 years. They should have earned a return of 5% p.a. and received $570,000 for retirement,. But the yield obtained by most of them would probably be 2% p.a. giving them only $306,000 (or 54%). The difference of $264,000 (i.e. 46% of the total) went to pay the high earnings and profits of the financial services industry. I am not aware of any other country in the developed world where as much as 46% is taken away from the hard earned life time savings of the people. Read more…

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