Insurance Today

Wow, I wasn't expecting so many of you to appreciate my previous post on reducing your income tax - thanks for the support! Remember to maximise your tax reliefs and deductions every year, so you'll end up saving up to thousands of dollars with just a few minutes of work! To all the new readers who just visited this space because you got directed here from Ho Ching or IRAS, hello! Anyway, as a continuation to the earlier post, now that we've explored the various ways to reduce our income taxes, the next step to look at would be the mode of payment. Should you opt for monthly repayments or a one-time yearly bill? Should you use GIRO or your credit card? Unfortunately, if you've ever tried paying for your cashback with your credit card in a bid to earn cashback or miles, you would have probably realised by now that tax payments (as well as that to government organisations) are usually excluded from these rewards. Even the SCB Unlimited Cashback card, which I've previo...

Is this Mothership article about an influencer promoting durian investments an attempt at deliberate plagiarism or just an ignorant mistake? More specifically, let's talk about whether large editorial publishing houses have the right to take a story that first broke in a small-time blogger's website without proper crediting where it is due. My first thought when I read it: HEY this looks suspiciously like MY article! *looks around for proper source crediting to SG Budget Babe. Finds none.* Let's start from the very beginning. On 19 April 2018, I first wrote about local lifestyle influencer @pxdkitty activities in promoting and recruiting her followers into making monetary investments into durian seedlings with a Malaysian company. My key message was that one should not be too quick to trust and put in money into any investment schemes recommended by influencers, whether it is lifestyle influencers OR even SG Budget Babe aka yours truly. This then culminated in a full post o...

(These investment schemes were alerted to me by some of my readers, who requested for this blog post to be written for greater awareness and that hopefully, this reaches and helps to inform more people.) Is it legal, or ethical, for influencers to peddle and push out investment schemes in Singapore? I've been seeing Instagram influencers pushing out investment opportunities, promoting it to their followers and asking them to direct message them for more details. As a bystander, what more a blogger who writes about personal finance, this makes me extremely uncomfortable. Case #1: Forex Investment with capital guaranteed + 24% fixed returns! Let's look at this forex investment case which a reader came to ask me about because she was keen on investing (yep, she got "influenced"). I gave her my honest opinion, which was that forex is highly volatile and extremely difficult to guarantee profits all the time, while also sharing about how most people get burnt in the forex ...

Back when I was still in my first job, my annual income tax was only about $200. This was based on a yearly income of $30,000, of which I saved $20,000 - read about how I did it here . (Nope, no bonuses either.) I don't mind paying taxes as I understand and appreciate the fact that the money is channeled for the government to help the lower-income groups, as well as pay for other public goods such as our roads, education, etc. But ever since I got headhunted to my second, and now third, job where I received a pay raise each time, my income taxes have jumped significantly and it has come to a point where I've been looking into (legal) ways to reduce paying so much. For context, my income tax jumped by over 10x, but my salary hasn't jumped 10x at all! I've talked about how achieving financial freedom involves cutting down your expenses while looking for ways to increase your income at the same time. Income tax is definitely one area where you'd want to reduce, becaus...