Salary.sg – Your Salary in Singapore

Juxtapose the profiles of 2 rich men – 1 of whom very rich – and you get some idea of how they grow their money.

Featured in Sunday Times today are decamillionaire couple George Raymond Zage III and his wife Kathleen Zage, and a rather rich insurance veteran Stanley Jeremiah.

Here’s what I gather from the information revealed about them:

• Property. The Zages own 4 properties “worth at least $16 million” and spent $20 million on their current residence, a Belmont Road bungalow. The other 3 properties are obviously used for investment purposes. I have earlier inferred that they are decamillionaires. They could possibly be hectamillionaires. Mr Jeremiah on the other hand made his best investment also in property – a terrace house which he sold for about $1 million in profit just before the 1997 financial crisis. He probably sold at the peak. He’s either very shrewd, very lucky, or both.
• Career. Mr Zage was an investment banker with Goldman Sachs. His wife was a private equity banker in UBS Investment Bank. Mr Jeremiah was a general manager at NTUC Income. They all had careers dealing with money and investments.
• Cars. The Zages own a Volvo SUV and a Honda. Mr Jeremiah has a BMW 7 series. Maybe they know that cars in Singapore are a big liability and don’t wish to indulge in overly expensive cars.

Read an interesting thread in Sammyboy in delphiforums titled “Engineering: A dead end career in SG”. Here are some interesting quotes from that thread:

“Most successful second-career Engineers I know switched line during their 2-3 year of work. Some became Bankers, some went into Sales, some went into IT… The world needs Engineers more than you think. Just not in this little red dot.”

“IT ain’t much better, most work have been outsourced to vendors… typical IT guy… just dreams of landing a good project management job … to show that he has arrived, or become an overpaid consultant/architect after getting CISSP/Sun Architect cert. Some lucky ones get a footing in SAP and drift off to become techno functional consultants.”

“any industry is bound to face the exact same thing. Lawyers and doctors … there are some that will not get very far in their career. Consider: some doctors will in the end just be a gp with a touch of contact eczema… Or you end up being a lawyer stuck in a firm in people’s park center… Banking only looks good during this bull run. Once the bubble bursts, you’ll see many being booted out. Those that cannot make it will find the lack of real technical prowess to be a bugbear.”

“well said….engineering in s’pore is a real dead end job…i myself got out of engineering 3yrs ago to be sales(though its engineering sales) & never once look back….”

“Wait till u deal with Accounting trained professionals..then u will realise Engineering isnt that bad after all..”

“After 7 years in industry, if you don’t earn at least $100k p.a., you’re not successful in your career. So you must be aggressive in job change”

The Big 4 accounting firms in Singapore – Deloitte, Ernst and Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers – have all raised the starting pay of fresh entrants.

This is reported in today’s Straits Times.

But auditor upstarts with the Big 4 still get low starting salaries of $2,400 to $2,600 per month compared to other industries like banks (up to $3,700) and civil service ($2,910 for accounting grads).

Maybe the silver lining in the cloud is the relatively higher increments the fresh entrants may get when they stay on – $500 to $1,000 a year according to this discussion in Flowerpod.com.sg.

The buy low sell high strategy makes so much perfect sense, it’s hard to understand why people are still flooding to buy stocks and property at this time. (Perhaps they want to buy high and sell higher.) To make money, we should invest a couple years earlier, not now. When you see undergraduates and housewives [...]

In case you’ve forgotten, the employer CPF contribution has just been increased from 13% to 14.5% (effective 1 July). If your gross income is $4,500 or more, this increase translates to, heh, an additional $67.50 to your CPF accounts each month. In fact, your Ordinary Account will get $45 and the remaining $22.50 goes to [...]

The private residential property price index shows that private home prices are now at a level surpassing the most recent boom in 1999. In fact, it’s heading north, up a steep curve, toward the peak level reached in the period just before the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The index, tracked by Urban Redevelopment Authority, is [...]

Tan Kin Lian claims structured products are bad in his column in My Paper, saying “I am not aware of any structured product that has produced a good outcome for the investor.” A structured product is a packaged investment product that is based on derivatives such as options. It guarantees protection of the principal (your [...]

As simple as it sounds, it can be quite hard to actually execute the age old adage that you should always buy low and sell high. Or is it buy high and sell higher? How do you know when is the right time to buy? After you buy, when should you sell? Should you buy [...]

What goes up must come down. It’s either sooner or later. The stock market and property market have been booming lately. Some of us may have made some money, while others may be regretting about not entering the market earlier. Depending on your market positions, a downturn may be good news to you. If news [...]

A wealth report released by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini puts Singapore as home to the world’s fastest-growing population of millionaires. Here’s a quick summary of what I found out from the report: Singapore saw the highest growth (21.2%) in High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs), followed by India (20.5%), Indonesia (16.0%), Russia (15.5%), UAE (15.4%), South [...]