This is not a post about personal finance. It is related to national finance. Trace Together tokens were collected for my family yesterday. I never gave any thought as to why not. Government give free, I take. I am a cheapskate. It was a natural knee-jerk reaction. Today, I realized I should have used the free Trace Together app instead of taking the token. I am writing this blog post to make amends. I will not collecting any more token when the existing token runs out of battery.
Let's do a worst-case scenario estimate of the cost of supplying every Singapore resident with a hardware token.  Each Trace-Together token is estimated to cost SGD20. To supply entire 5.7m population of Singapore, the total cost will be around SGD114m. The battery life for each token is 6 months and the battery is non-rechargeable. So, every 6 months, Singapore will have to...