Author: Singapore Man of Leisure

Cutting coupons, jumping through hoops to earn that extra 1% plus in interest, skipping that drink during lunch, looking for the lowest cost ETFs or brokers… I know, a little bit, little bit will slowly add up to a mountain as in the words of wisdom from our Malay friends: Sedikit-sedikit lama-lama jadi bukit. However, there are 3 major financial decisions that if we got them “wrong”, all the nickel and dime above will come to naught… Your first property purchase Buying our first home, whether it be public housing or private properties, this is probably our biggest financial...

No, its not your rate of investment returns. Nope, its not the rate of inflation that will eat into your rate of investment returns above. Or for that matter, what withdrawal rate to use? (Friend, its not that birth control technique) Ah… You almost got it if you say how to plan whether at 65 you’ll be still healthy to do line-dancing, marathons, and overseas travelling; or will you have an Eldershield kind of lifestyle… Are you ready? Please tell me when you intend to see your maker? If you got 2 more years to live, I suspect you’ll discover you have enough right here, right now. Can quit and...

To recap from my previous post: Invest – risk capital to capture (outsized) capital gains and/or income. Saving – seeking conservative yield in return for no risk to capital (in nominal terms). Why in nominal terms? Well, if you include inflation adjusted returns, it gets us no where since you and I know the CPI is just a statistical index. What we chose to include and exclude, we can manipulate it to whatever we want to show. For eg, if CPI shows inflation is 3.5%, then voluntarily contributing to CPF OA to get the 2.5% interest is “dumb”… When...

I am back to mess with your head. There are times when I am anal when it comes to precision in our choice of words – we mean what we say; we say what we mean. (Of course it helps if we have a wider grasp of vocabulary) However, there are times we should not let the trickery of words fool us. Nor get trapped by words by insisting to split hairs when it comes to semantics… Today, I shall illuminate the difference between investing and saving. Investing When we invest, we tend to think in terms of windfall....

Look! Just cut your tennis balls in half and you can save more space! Wah lah! Don’t laugh. Just look at some of the shitty financial “advice” out there: 1)  The more you spend the more you “save” kind… Enough said. 2)  Collect air miles and fly or upgrade for free! Hello, unless your Ah Kong (corporate company) pays for the air tickets, or you charge your business expenses on your personal credit card, these air miles are not “free”. 3)  And then there’s this come here little mouse… See the loops and hoops over there? Now jump through all of them and we’ll “reward” you...

Psst. Try this. If CPF is paying 2.5% interests, while banks are paying less than 1% for savings accounts, why don’t you pay up your housing loans using cash? This way, you don’t touch your CPF and you can enjoy the magic of compounding with higher interest rates? Also, by not touching CPF for housing, you won’t be “asset rich; cash poor” when you reach age 55 or 65. How? Isn’t this less cumbersome than using cash to top-up CPF and then use CPF to payoff your housing loan? A bit LPPL right? (No, I’m not going to translate what...