Net Worth

If you and your spouse are working professionals making median salaries, it’s not hard for both of you to accumulate $1 million before you reach 45 years old.
Suppose both of you started working at age 25, and always save and invest one-third of your income. If your savings and investments earn just a 3% rate [...]

We conducted a poll on how much Salary.sg readers save. The results of the poll show that the average saving rate of our readers is 33.1%.
The average Salary.sg saves about one-third of his/her monthly salary.
The poll attracted more than 700 responses, 32% of which picked 21-40% as their saving rate.
Another interesting finding is that about [...]

Some people save a fixed amount of their monthly income and spend the rest. Others like myself spend prudently and save the rest.
Regardless of whether you’re a spend-the-rest or save-the-rest saver, you should be able to gauge roughly how much you save a month.
Though thrift and financial prudence have been extolled as good “Asian values”, [...]

This will be a fair comparison of how good a wealth accumulator you are. Rather than comparing the dollar amount of your net worth, we will stack you up against others in terms of your net worth over income.
If a person makes $100k/year and has $500k in net worth, he’s definitely a much better wealth [...]

According to the Straits Times (Sep 19), median home prices in 2008 were about 16.3 times the median annual income that year.
The article never mentioned if 16.3x is a bearable or even realistic figure for individual households.
Using ST’s median figures for 2008, if a household making $59,400/year were to buy a $970,000 condo, it would [...]

Frank sharing and valuable insights from a guest (thanks!) in our Salary.sg Forums, in response to a list of questions I posed in an old article on how to get rich:
- How did you make your first million?
“Made my first million i think around 30 or 31 years old. Graduated from uni in 1999, started [...]

We have launched Salary.sg Forums.
Now you can discuss salary, job, career and investment matters in a user-friendly forum format.
Powered by vBulletin – which is the most popular forum engine among top discussion forums worldwide – you can now view well organized threads of discussions and reply directly to a particular thread or post that is [...]

In the book “The Millionaire Next Door”, the authors defined prodigious accumulators of wealth as people who manage to accumulate twice their expected net worth.
To calculate your expected net worth, refer to this old Salary.sg post. (Note that I called it “target net worth” previously.)
This chart gives you an idea of how much net worth [...]

Banks use the Debt Service Ratio to assess your creditworthiness.
Defined as the monthly loan installment amount divided by your gross monthly income, your DSR typically has to be somewhere in the 35% to 40% region for banks to be happy to grant you that mortgage. (See also past article on second home loan.)
However, the DSR [...]

The average household has a net wealth of $710,400, says an interesting article in New Paper on Sunday.
“Total Assets: $859,970
Currency & Deposits $157,930
Shares & Securities $120,360
Life Insurance Equity $76,820
CPF/Pension Funds $119,930
Residential Property $384,920
Total Liabilities: $149,570
Mortgage Loans $110,390
Personal Loans $39,180
Net Wealth: $710,400“
But that figure applies to the average household. What about the average person?
To keep things [...]