Insurance Today

With 2016 coming to a close, I decided to take a look at how I fared this year and whether I had met the financial goals I'd set for myself. When I first started this blog as a financial notebook to keep an account of all my learnings on this personal finance journey, my initial focus in 2014 was all about cutting down expenses and maximising my savings.  In 2015, I achieved my goals of growing my savings and cleaning up my insurance policies, but did really badly on the investment  portion due to timing. I'd made the mistake of being impatient to start, and used up my savings in the first half of the year, only to see huge paper losses after when the oil and China crisis hit. My stock performance were horrendous. Other financial bloggers encouraged me by saying those were "school fees" that "people pay to the stock market to learn about investing", but while it helped to curb my emotions, I was still frustrated with myself. So here's a review of I fared...

TAIWAN HONEYMOON ITINERARY If you're looking for a cheap but romantic destination in Asia, Taiwan is one of my favouritie countries to visit. I highly recommend visiting, and it is a place that I always find myself coming back to! Go during January - March if you're a fan of the cold, so you can snuggle up with your other half while being bundled in pretty coats. It isn't too chilly either as the temperatures feel more like air-con levels, and there'll be sakura blooms at Yangmingshan as well if you're keen on that! Here's a recommended 10-day itinerary which we planned when we went there to get some romantic time together. Day 1: Land in Kaohsiung - Pier 2 Art District - Formosa Boulevard Station (Dome of Light) - Cijin Island half-day island cycling (cheap seafood + lighthouse) - Love River Day 2: Kaohsiung (Zuoying) - Lotus Lake - Ancient buildings behind the old city wall  - Travel to Taichung Day 3: Taichung - Dakeng Lovers' Bridge - Xinshe Castle day t...

With 10 long weekends coming up in 2017, where's the best place to go for a short (and ideally cheap) getaway? Work has been getting increasingly stressful for us this year with more responsibilities on our plate, and we definitely need to get out of the country once in a while to recharge and escape from it all. There are tons of cheap deals and discounts running for flights and hotels, and I've detailed some tips on how you can pay less for budget flight tickets for a trip out of Singapore in a previous post here. But just as you get all happy with having gotten a cheap plane ticket, there comes the headache of having to plan your travel itinerary and book all the respective tourist attractions. The costs escalate, and I lost track of how many hours I've spent on researching each attraction because everything is always in different websites or places. Every website promises to give the lowest cost available, and then I find another website with an even lower cost after a ...

If we're not careful about banking fees, we'll be losing a lot more than we gain from the bank. I learnt this first-hand when I didn't monitor a savings account I had opened during my university days. I always thought just keeping it aside would be safe, but boy, was I wrong. By the time I realised it, the bank had deducted hundreds of dollars from my account to pay for the "account servicing fee" (in other words, just keeping my money for me), as my deposit amount had dropped to below the required minimum balance. This was completely new to me as I've never experienced this with my POSB account before. I didn't manage to pull up all the records, but here's one of them. The bank paid me a pathetic 2 cents in interest, while they happily deducted $10 from me. That's almost like the equivalent of the bank getting 49,900% in returns from me just because I was an ignorant customer! Hundreds of dollars had been taken away from me without my knowing it, ...

Like most Asian children, I've been giving my parents $200 each  every month. This is usually done through monthly bank transfers, but recently I made a change by giving my parents their allowance through CPF cash top-ups instead. But money in the CPF is untouchable! It took me a while to convince my parents about the merits of this move. But there are multiple benefits that eventually got me off my lazy butt to make this change. Why contribute to their CPF? While some reasons are already listed in the graphic above, the main reasons that drove me to make this change were: 1. Tax reliefs For each $10k rise in annual income, you also have to pay twice of your usual taxes. When I was on my pathetic $2,500 salary in my first job, I only had to pay $200 in yearly income tax. However, once your annual earnings hit $40k, that rises to $550 in taxes. Earning $50k means you'll have to pay more than double of that i.e. $1,250. An additional $10k income raise also increases your tax by a...

“Honey, let’s invest and buy the BIGGEST BTO flat in the MOST CENTRAL location so that we can sell it off for a huge profit next time!” Does this sound familiar? Indeed, this is the mindset of many Singaporean couples, who believe that buying and selling property is a sure way to make them rich. While BTOs are indeed one of the cheapest housing options around, biting off more than you can chew is potentially financial suicide. Since I’m getting married next year, N and I have started looking at housing options. This post is about what we learnt about BTO flats when considering whether to get one for ourselves. How much do BTO flats actually cost? According to HDB, 80% of BTO flat buyers in 2015 can service their home loans fully from CPF . This means that they are not paying a single cent cash for their monthly instalment! But as we all saw earlier this year, sale prices of BTO flats in Bidadari were NOT CHEAP. The selling price of a 4-room flat was $480,000! A 5-room flat was even mor...