Insurance Today

TLDR: Do you really need wedding ampoules / airbrush makeup and what are the usual hidden costs I should watch out for? Since embarking on this entire wedding affair, I've come to realise that the wedding industry is full of profiteering vendors who are quite ready to sell you exorbitant services or packages as you try to put together your dream wedding. And nowhere is this more prominent than in the bridal makeup and hair styling industry.  I had initially budgeted $200 for wedding makeup and hair. Once I started sourcing for quotes, I realised this amount could barely even buy me a pre-wedding look, much less for my actual day. So I then increased my budget by twice, hoping that it'll be enough, but apparently not for all vendors. These were the rates I got quoted for: Pre Wedding (1 look): $150 - $380 Actual Day (2 looks): $370 - $1,100 If you divide that by the number of work hours, a higher-end wedding makeup artist is pretty much earning $550 PER HOUR for just painting a ...

Have you ever wondered about how much your lifestyle will cost when you turn 65? ? How much do you think you'll need every month to get by? $800? $1000? $1500?  The folks at The Fifth Person ran a calculation on estimated living costs 30 years from now, and I thought it'll make for a fun exercise to tweak it to something closer to us 90s kids. Let's work out the numbers. To keep our calculations simple, we will assume that the overall rate of inflation is 3% (in line with existing data over the past decade, and what TFP referenced). I'm not far from hitting 30, so let's use that as a gauge. In 35 years, we'll be 65 years old, and getting $1,300 every month from my CPF payouts - assuming the full retirement sum remains constant at $166,000. Source :  CPF For those of you who would want to try making your own calculations, here's the formula:  Principal x (1 + inflation rate)^number of years Essential living  expenses Food & Groceries  Current cost: $50/w...

If you think financial education is expensive, try financial ignorance instead. Two notable investment schemes were in the news last week for all the wrong reasons, and they both had eerily similar characteristics of promising their investors unbelievably high monthly returns. Last week, investors cried out when their money didn't come through. You may call me skeptical, but I never believe folks who tell me they have any "lobang" or "proven tactic" which is "guaranteed to make money". If money is really that easy to come by, then there wouldn't be so many poor people in the world. I believe in hard work and patience instead. Charter Fine Ventures offered their investors 15% in monthly returns and it is believed that investors deposited USD 20 million with them, whereas JJPTR offered 20% and went on to lose 500 million ringgit in a single day (>USD 100 million). I can only say I'm glad I wasn't one of those investors. Taken from  The Str...