Salary.sg – Your Salary in Singapore

According to our calculations, your citizenship is worth $4,511 more than permanent residents per year. For that, you have to serve NS if you are male, and watch some of your PR friends sell their HDBs for a good profit and then return to their (sometimes) cheaper home countries to enjoy retirement.

As a Singapore citizen, here’s what you enjoy (reference: ST, 24 Oct 2009 online link):

• Child birth. If you stay in a Class B2+ ward, you pay $475. For PR, it’s $506, which is $31 more. The average Singapore woman has about 1 child and will thus get the $10,000 baby bonus (we ignore the fact that she will have to split the bonus with her husband). Spread over 20 years of providing for the child, the baby bonus amounts to $500 per year. Total child birth benefit: $31 + $500 = $531/yr.
• Childcare subsidy. Singaporean working mum gets a $300/mth subsidy while PRs get nothing. Total childcare benefit: $3,600/yr.
• School fees. PRs pay $2,884 more than Singaporeans per child for the 16 years of education all the way to university. This is $180/yr.
• Marriage fees. Insignificant.
• Housing. Though PRs are not eligible to buy new flats, many Singaporeans also do not buy new flats. Since both citizens and PRs are eligible to buy resale flats, for ease of comparison, we will treat housing benefit as insignificant. [Added 1 Nov: Married citizens enjoy a $30k-$40k grant, while singles can get $11k-$20k.  Spread over the long term of owning a home, say over 30 years, this is about $666/yr per person in addition to the $4,511 calculated previously, making a total of $5,177/yr. Thanks to the reader who highlighted this.]
• Health subsidies. Citizens get about 10% more subsidy than PRs. Assuming that an average citizen spends $20k over 10 years, this 10% difference amounts to $200/yr.

Grand total: $4,511 per year. Note that if you’re single, it would be just $200 per year.

No wonder the ST reporter Zakir Hussain said “the distinctions between citizens and PRs could not have been clearer.”

Do you think your citizenship should be worth a lot more?

While some doctors and administrators are having a friendly debate, I would like to bring your attention to another interesting discussion.

A reader by the name “wonder” claims that his friends in GLCs earn double of what MNC employees earn.

I’m a little sceptical, so let’s do an unscientific poll.

Let’s compare the ratio of high earners in GLCs to that in MNCs.

Are you working in a GLC or an MNC? Do you make more than S$100k/yr?

The STI index closed today at a year-high of 2,712.15, up more than 80% from its bottom just 7 months ago.

About a month before the market hit the bottom, I talked about exploiting the recession. STI was around 1,700 then.

And about a month after the market hit bottom, I talked about market cycle investing and again advised that the time was right to put your money into shares after setting aside some savings. STI was also around 1,700.

If you had bought blue chip shares at those times, you would have made around 60% profit.

If you had bought property with a loan a few months earlier, you would have made even more.

That said, market cycle investing has its risks, but I think they are reasonable risks to take if you have excess cash savings.

Have you sold your investments to take profit?

The most accurate (arguably) income comparison tool on the island has been updated.
Once again, we take the data points from the latest Iras Annual Report 2008/2009 and produce the following tool that stack you up against all resident taxpayers.
In our view, the data from the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore is much more comprehensive than [...]

According to one measure of affordability, our houses are less affordable than major cities like Sydney, Toronto, New York and even Tokyo.
The mainstream media and HDB have (unsurprisingly) claimed otherwise and probably will give 101 reasons to support their arguments.
More annoyingly, without much hint of sympathy, the media reported that “buyers can be narrowly focused” [...]

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 [...]

Don’t let mainstream media headlines like “Most top PSLE students stay in HDB flats” (link) mislead you into thinking that HDB kids are top students.
All it takes is a sharp eye and a thinking mind to see the facts. Straits Times reader Mr Visakan Veerasamy wrote to the papers today:
“The statistics given in the (newspaper [...]

We’ve updated our popular income comparison calculator.
The data points come from Ministry of Manpower’s Report on Labour Force in Singapore 2008 released early this year.
Take your annual income (including bonus) and divide by 12 to derive your “gross monthly income” when using this income benchmarking tool:

Last year’s version of the tool is here. See how [...]

A forum letter to the Straits Times highlighted a different way to measure affordability.
Based on Numbeo’s “house price to income ratio”, Singapore ranks below major cities like Tokyo, Barcelona, Milan, Dublin, Toronto, New York City, Geneva, Oslo, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Sydney, Vienna, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Zurich, Copenhagen and Berlin.
This means: if we use all our annual [...]