Salary.sg – Your Salary in Singapore

The average expenditure of all Singapore households is $4,388 per month. This is according to the Household Expenditure Survey (HES) report released last month by the Singapore Department of Statistics.

Households staying in 5-room and executive HDB flats spend an average of $4,926 per month, while those in 3-rooms and 4-rooms spend $2,482 and $3,551 respectively.

Families in private housing spend much more, with those in private flats (including condos) expending $7,793 per month, and those in landed properties $9,962.

As we all know: the more you spend, the less you save; and conversely, the less you spend, the more you save. Many of Salary.sg readers have accumulated $1million in savings and investments through sheer financial prudence.

How much does your household spend a month?

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 of return a year, you would have accumulated half a million dollars by age 37 and a full million bucks by age 45.

And this is just for median-salaried professionals.

Let’s look at another hypothetical couple who are median-salaried managers. Let’s assume they save more, say 40% of their income. Further assume that they are able to generate a 5% rate of return.

This couple’s savings and investments will hit $1 million before they turn 39. And $2 million by age 46.

When did your savings and investments reach $1 million?

Don’t have a million dollars? Don’t worry. You probably have that upmarket condo, BMW and Birkin bag that you can be proud of.

One good way to achieve financial success (i.e. make lots of money) is to do business. This is a view shared by one of the (few) millionaire forummers at Salary.sg Forums:

“- If I want to be rich, what’s your advice for me?
It seems to me that the only way to be rich for most who aren’t suitable for the corporate ladder is a business…”

Kudos to the government, it’s extremely simple to register for a small business in Singapore.

It’s extremely cheap too.

If you think you can offer certain products and services that can generate money for you, you should consider setting up a sole proprietorship.

Yes, you can also be a freelancer, but you will be limiting yourself to smaller projects. Customers and suppliers may also insist on dealing with registered businesses and ask for official invoices, POs and such.

To assist you in your business registration, there are some comprehensive guides in ACRA and EnterpriseOne.

The guides are good, but I would summarize and extend the info with the following recommended steps:

1. Get a new gmail account. It’s free and offers lots of space. Why use your personal email for your business when you can have a new and dedicated one?
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2. Get a new prepaid mobile number. It costs about $10 and you get to keep your personal number, well, personal.
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3. Get a Virtual Office address. For as low as $100/yr, you can “rent” a virtual office address space from one of several VO providers such as www.virtualoffice.com.sg and www.smartvirtualoffice.com.sg. All business communications will be sent to the rented address and you can either ask them to forward the mail to you or self-collect at their premises. By having a VO, you avoid paying hefty rents for an actual shop or office space.
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4. Login with your SingPass at BizFile and register a for a sole proprietorship. You need to provide a proposed business name, start date, description of activities, a business address (use the VO address you rented in step 3), and some personal details. Costs are $15 for “name approval” and a further $50 for the actual business registration.
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5. Open a current account with a bank. I recommend using DBS. As almost everyone here has either a DBS or POSB account, you can easily collect payment via DBS funds transfer, which is effected immediately (other interbank transfers take at least a day).

You ask, “What’s my pay increment for 2010?” Mercer says you can expect 3.2% pay rise next year.
The HR consultancy based its projection on a recent survey of 262 companies across 11 industries.
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If you are a car owner, does your pay match your car ownership status? If you don’t have a car, how do you know whether you can afford one? In this article, Salary.sg proposes using $7,650 as an income guideline for car ownership in Singapore.
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Many people often wonder if they can afford to stay in private housing. There are various ways to find the answer. You can ask a bank, calculate your debt ratios, use our 7.6x guideline, or compare your income with the average income of your desired housing type – which is the main topic of this [...]

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This year, civil servants will get the usual AWS and a one-off payment of 0.25 month capped at $750.
This means that a civil servant earning a monthly salary of $3k will get 1.25 months of bonus worth $3,750, whereas another civil servant earning $10k a month will only get 1.075 months or $10,750.
Whose bonus would [...]

Much has been mentioned about the “transparency” of Sibor-pegged mortgage loans. But there are TWO risks associated with such loans.
First is of course the possibility that the Sibor rate may go up. And it may shoot up dramatically.
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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 [...]