Salary.sg – Your Salary in Singapore

Do you know that Singapore uses a progressive tax system? The tax rate increases as the chargeable amount increases. (See IRAS tax rates.)

A person with a chargeable income of $100k is taxed $7,100 or 7.1%.

But if the chargeable amount was $300k he has to pay $39,300 in taxes or 13.1%.

Fair?

Here’s the income tax calculator for this year. Just enter your expected chargeable income:

How much is your income tax this year?

The latest COE Bidding Results are out. With the exception of the motorcycle category, all other categories recorded their highest prices in recent years.

To buy a small car, you now have to pay $28,389 for that “Certificate of Entitlement”. (I heard an NUS degree costs less. )

Car dealers have also promptly adjusted their car prices upwards, some by more than $10k.

Previously, I said one should make at least $7,650 in order to prudently own a car. Maybe now it should be even more.

If you are a car owner, do you (and your spouse) make more than $7,650/mth?

The next time you hear the word “locals”, tell yourself it actually means “PRs and citizens”.

Similarly, “foreigners” means “foreigners who are non-PRs”.

Locals aren’t all Singapore citizens, and foreigners don’t include PRs. Confusing?

In yet another good example of the locals-foreigners confusion, the Manpower Ministry has proclaimed in its Labour Market 2009 report that “there were 1,053,500 foreigners forming 35.2% of total employment in December 2009″ (italics are mine).

By “foreigners”, the ministry is of course referring to “foreigners who are non-PRs”. The foreigners who are PRs are not included in the 1,053,500 count. Instead, they are lumped together with citizens in the “locals” group. It’s only on page 57 of the report that you get a clear and unambiguous statement on this:

“a local (also known as resident) employee is any Singapore citizen or Permanent Resident who is employed…” (emphasis mine).

So exactly how many non-citizens are there in our workforce? I don’t know.

But to get an idea of how many non-citizens are in our workforce – i.e. foreigners who are not citizens regardless of whether they are PRs or not – we have to do some calculations. (Heck, are they testing our maths?)

According to that MOM report, there are 1,053,500 non-PR foreigners and 1,936,500 citizens+PRs in our workforce.

Next, according to Singstat, there are 533,200 PRs. Let’s conservatively estimate that 50% of these PRs are active in our workforce. We shall cross-check* this ratio shortly.

This means: out of the 1,936,500 “locals”, 266,600 are PRs.

1,936,500 – 266,600 = 1,669,900

So, our workforce consists of 1,669,900 citizens, 266,600 PRs and 1,053,500 non-PR foreigners.

Add up the latter two and we have 1,320,100 non-citizens.

This is a hefty 44% of our workforce of 2.99 million. Ta-da.

44% of our workforce are non-citizens!

* Let’s cross-check the 50% employment estimate with that of citizens: out of the 3.2m Singapore citizens, 1.6699m are in the workforce as calculated above. This is already 52%. If anything, we should use a higher estimate for PRs. Don’t tell me PRs have more dependents than citizens – if they do, we should question why we are granting PR status to so many economically inactive foreigners.

Do you feel there are more than 44% non-citizens around you at work?

$52,350 is the median income of all resident taxpayers for YA2008, which I calculated based on the numbers in IRAS annual reports.
You can use this income comparison tool to see which percentile you belong to.
However, the main objective of this article is to show how much the median income has grown over the years, as [...]

It’s common knowledge that there is a salary ceiling of $4,500 for both employer and employee CPF contributions.
If you earn more than $4,500, you only need to contribute $900 (=20% x $4,500) to your CPF.
Even if you make $20k a month, you still contribute $900. Your employer contributes $652.50 (=14.5% x $4,500). The rates [...]

If you have been working for some years, you should have a rather significant amount of money in your CPF Special Account.
The savings in your CPF SA currently still earn a 4% interest rate, totally risk free. There’s also an additional 1% interest paid to the first $60k of OA+SA.
The interest is high enough to [...]

Congrats on your new condo purchase. It’s a significant milestone in your investment journey.
You diligently studied the property market and got in at what you think is the right time.
And now, all that’s left to do is to find a tenant. Yes, you’re renting out your spanking new private apartment, fully furnished.
As a person who’s [...]

When I posted about graduate couples having no problems saving $1 million, I used an investment return of 3% in my calculations.
If you can consistently generate a 3% return every year, you will turn $100,000 into $103,000 in 1 year, and then make that $103,000 become $106,090 in 1 more year. With such compounding, your [...]

We can reasonably expect Singapore to plunge back into recession at the end of this quarter. If it does, we will be the first country in Asia, and possibly the world, to experience a double dip recession in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.
Our economy first dipped into a technical recession in Q3 2008.
Advance [...]

9.2% of resident taxpayers made $100k to $150k in YA2008, up from 7.8% in YA2004. The increase has been gradual and consistent through the years.
In fact, all income tax brackets above the $80k mark saw a similar increase.
In contrast, it was a decreasing trend for the lower income brackets between the $25k and $50k levels.
These [...]