The Government and Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) are planning to introduce Singapore Savings Bonds (SSB), a new type of bonds to help individual investors get a better return on their savings. “In short, the Singapore Savings Bonds will offer the higher returns of a long-term bond and give what investors call a term premium,…
As I started planning for my retirement, I began to pay attention to how our Central Provident Fund (CPF) system works for retirees. As retirees reach the age of 55, CPF allows them to withdraw $5,o00 and transfers the rest of the money from their Ordinary Account (OA) and Special Account (SA) to their Retirement Account…
Over the past week, the local media has been giving bite-sized news about what’s going to be announced in Singapore Budget 2015 plan and today, the Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister, Tharman Shanmugaratnam gave the speech to give the full details about Singapore Budget 2015 on local television. I didn’t really care much about…
As someone who is planning for retirement, it is obvious that any change made to the CPF system can easily throw a wrench into the gears of a smooth sailing retirement plan. Therefore every time the government makes a change into the CPF system, it warrants a close examination on the impact it makes to my…
On the way to the Sydney airport for my flight back to Singapore, I had an interesting conversation with the taxi driver who picked me up. Let’s call him, R. His life history R is a 50 year old Australia who used to be a Russian military officer. When the Russian military ordered R to…
I’ve covered what are annuities and what they could do for your retirement portfolio in my earlier post. In this post, I want to provide a different perspective about annuities and why you may not want to have them in your retirement portfolio to give an all-round view about annuities. Like all financial products, there…