Salary.sg – Your Salary in Singapore

Once every year, we update this income comparison tool, which is one of Salary.sg’s most popular income comparison calculators.

As always, the data points for this come from Ministry of Manpower’s Report on Labour Force in Singapore 2009 released earlier this year.

To compare your “gross monthly income”, divide your total income (including bonus) by 12 and enter it below:

Compare your ranking with the 2009 version of this tool. If your income remained the same, you would most likely move up a little in your ranking, because:

“… the median income for all employed residents dipped by 1.2% from $2,450 in 2008 to $2,420 in 2009 …”

Reference: Statistical Table 42, Report on Labour Force in Singapore 2009, Ministry of Manpower (link)

The Public Service Division has announced that civil servants will get a total of 2 months bonus this year end, with 1 month for the Annual Variable Component (AVC) and another 1 month for the Non-Pensionable Annual Allowance (NPAA), also known as the 13th month payment.

This year-end bonus is on top of the 0.5 month + $300 cash bonus they have already received in mid-2010.

Further, good performers will also receive a Special Variable Payment (SVP) of “up to 1.6 months” in March 2011.

Other interesting bits from the PSD news release:

• Administrative Officers in Staff Grade I (MR4), whose pay is pegged to two-thirds of the salary of the median earner among 48 top earners in Singapore (top 8 earners from 6 professions), will each be getting a total of $1,583,900 for 2010.
• Administrative Officers in the entry Superscale grade (SR9), whose  pay is similarly pegged, but to the 32-year-old top earners, will each get a total of $365,000 for 2010.

If you are a male citizen who has served NS (or is still serving), the SAF Group Term Life Insurance by Aviva is perhaps the cheapest term insurance you can get.

Term insurance is also known as “pure protection” insurance. It does not include any investment component, unlike ILPs and other investment-linked life policies. The term premiums you pay will go toward insuring against the unfortunate events.

However, insurers and agents are very reluctant in selling term insurance. The main reason is that they make much less money selling term policies. It’s also the reason why most people are unaware of term insurance.

To know more about the benefits of term insurance, see past Salary.sg articles on avoiding investment-linked policies and insurance experts themselves don’t buy life policies.

Tan Kian Lian mentioned in his blog a benchmark for comparing term premiums: $541 (a year) for a male aged 30 insuring $200,000 for 20 years. If you use this benchmark, you will find the SAF Group Term Life Insurance extremely attractive.

Based on a comment left at Tan’s blog: Aviva charges only $12/mth for an insured amount of $100k!

In the insurance industry, an actuary is a technical specialist whose job is to analyse the likelihood that policy holders make claims against their insurance policies. Actuaries use mathematics, economics, computer science, finance, probability and statistics, and even business skills in their work. If actuaries themselves don’t buy whole life and investment-linked policies, what does it say [...]

Tan Kin Lian wrote an excellent letter on term insurance to the ST, which today had an editorial article on the same topic. If you don’t know him, Tan Kin Lian was the ex-CEO of NTUC Income, one of the largest insurance companies in Singapore. He served 30 years as CEO (!!) and retired in [...]

The average net worth in Singapore is US$255,488 per adult, according to the just-released and inaugural Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report 2010. In Singapore dollar terms, this is S$335k per adult. If you do not know how to calculate your net worth (also known simply as “wealth” in the report), see the Salary.sg article on Calculating [...]

There are more and more wealthy people in Singapore. The number of High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs) increased by 32.7% to 81,600 according to the latest Asia-Pacific Wealth Report 2010 by Capgemini and Merill Lynch. This is also reported in Todayonline. In the Asia Pacific region, the increase is less steep, at 25.8%. This tells us [...]

Expatriates working in Singapore are doing well economically. 45% of them are earning an income of more than S$265,000, according to the HSBC Expat Explorer Survey 2010. Note: S$265k = US$200k. According to the survey report, Singapore is ranked 1st by the proportion of expats who make more $200k USD a year. Bermuda is 2nd [...]

We have updated our ever-popular income benchmarking tool to use Iras’ latest data. Our income comparison tool needs no introduction. If you have not heard of it, see last year’s edition. The past 4 editions of this tool have attracted a total of more than 230 comments. To use it, just type in your annual [...]

Private tutor Phang Yu Hon who gives Physics tuition earned a whopping $520,000 last year. He paid over $85k in taxes. In a video interview with ST, he said he will be earning even more this year: “My income has been going up exponentially. So, I think this year it’s going to be even higher. [...]