Wednesday 30 November 2022

Singapore asset management increases 16% year on year | How it affects us as Singaporeans

In the earlier article that I wrote, I mentioned about the greatest wealth transfer incoming where baby boomers are set to pass to their children more than $68 trillion in assets. It might sound funny to the ordinary folks like me as I don’t think there is a huge amount of inheritance for me but for the high net worth individuals (HNWI), this is a huge thing and lots of planning has to be done prior.

Singapore has definitely seen a wave of HNWI and we can see that from the properties being bought, family offices being set up as well as just news that talk about how Singapore is a hub for the HNW to come to.

From this article ,”According to the 2021 Singapore Asset Management survey published by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), total assets managed by Singapore-based asset managers grew 16% y-o-y to reach $5.4 trillion, up from $4.6 trillion in 2021.” This is a substantial increase especially so in times like these as it shows that the HNW individuals find Singapore an attractive place to place their wealth here.

Asset Management and the role of an asset manager

Asset management is the practice of increasing an individuals wealth over time by helping to invest and trade assets that appreciate over time. It can involve different instruments and products depending on the individual’s risk appetite and main goals for the funds provided. Asset managers help in the providing their services and some might be affiliated to certain financial institutions or work independently.

Singapore has also been very welcoming to HNWI, for example, Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the Economic Development Board (EDB) have set up a Family Office Development Team to lead and coordinate initiatives that will enhance Singapore’s position as Asia’s premier base for family offices.

With more HNWI making Singapore their base, we should also be paying attention to wealth disparity

It might seem a good thing that more HNWI are making Singapore their base with funds coming in showing that people are confident in Singapore’s future and we are Southeast Asia regional hub as more companies look to set up their HQ here. However, wealth disparity or inequality comes up as more HNWI enters Singapore, we can see that the HNWI purchases property units here, also as more of these HNWI come in, they would also want to bring in their networks or family which can be a plus point as there might be investments or job opportunities opening in Singapore.

Overall, from Blackbox Research, they have found that amongst Singaporeans, 4 in 5 (81%) are worried about the widening income gap. Youths (90%) and young working adults (86%) are more likely to feel anxious about the unequal distribution of income and 7 in 10 Singaporeans (69%) feel that income inequality in Singapore has worsened over the past 5 years, with more than 1 in 4 (27%) believing the income gap has gotten “much worse”.

It really is difficult to manage this situation as we see the government wanting to attract overseas talent and companies are very willing to offer them high compensation. Of course, we need the companies and talents to come to Singapore to bring jobs and also learn from them on the skillsets however inevitably, things will get more expensive as they can afford to pay more and things that are based on demand and supply, will increase if they are very much willing to pay.

What I can do?

I would say opportunities to grow your career are there but definitely it depends on which industry you are in and how willing are you to pivot or learn new skills depending on your age. Having HNWI coming over to Singapore might bring opportunities to the country but at the same time, widen the wealth gap. We have to work on improving our skills and capitalising on our jobs to increase our income.

Certain roles tend to earn more as they are the profit centers and the job role demands much more than others. Communication is very important and I believe your network can be a huge advantage in your career. Of course, we all have our own goals whether it is to earn more or have work life balance. No one knows how the world will be like 10, 20, 30 years from now. The skills needed might be different so living in the present is also important rather than thinking too much to the future. The world of the HNWI is unreachable in my lifetime at least as of now that I am planning based on my income so I will just live a happy life and hope the wealth inequality doesn’t widen too much.

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Sunday 27 November 2022

Greatest wealth transfer incoming | Why talking about it might help

Even though the markets and economy has been horrible with much more bad news coming, I recently came across this interesting article which was about how the greatest wealth transfer is about to be happening where baby boomers are set to pass to their children more than $68 trillion in assets. This is really interesting as inheritance will prove to be a huge thing as baby boomers pass on and the wealth is passed down to the young. 

The article talks about why the wealth transfer might not be as much as you think and why it is important to talk about it. Certain parts of my article might sound superficial but I do think it is good to be talking about finances and how you will be leaving your wealth to your children.

Summary of article

The baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964 have accumulated substantial wealth either through property or some even through stocks and maybe even pure savings. Properties and other assets were relatively more affordable when the baby boomers were young as compared to now and with the assets being passed down, the wealth transfer will be substantial.

Preparing for the wealth transfer

Although you might be thinking that the wealth transfer is positive and definitely beneficial to the children, I am sure majority would rather their parents to live a healthy and long life than have a huge inheritance but their parents pass on early. This is true and people do live longer nowadays due to better healthcare and more conscious eating habits and lifestyle so baby boomers will still require a certain amount of wealth over a long period of time to sustain themselves. Baby Boomers hence will have to ensure that their wealth is sufficient and that it can sustain them through old age.

Discussion on wealth

A few articles recently talk about having a conversation with your parents about their views of money and how they are managing or will manage it in case of anything that happens. I believe the government is also trying to make sure that family members are able to make decisions if their loved ones are ill and are unable to do so hence waiving the LPA application fees and allowing it to be accessible to many although the decisions might not just be financially.

For the wealthy, it might be difficult saying out how much is left and usually most of it are done by the professionals, eg they engage investment trust or set up family offices to manage their wealth or have lawyers to make sure their will is in place.

It is a shock to some if they were to suddenly receive a large amount of inheritance especially so if there was no prior talk and a low financial literacy can result in the money being depleted. So getting to have a conversation to prepare the individuals can allow them to know what is coming although it can be a danger at times if you were to reveal how much you are worth and what they will be getting when you leave the world.

Charitable Intent

I am sure many have heard of the rich saying that they will not be passing down their wealth to their children and instead it will be donated. With a sizeable amount of wealth accumulated, some will choose to donate their wealth and this is equally a huge decision. The main point of the article is that parents should try to communicate on the sum although I would say it depends on the relationship and also how huge the amount is as every family has very different circumstances and most of us do not even know when we will leave the Earth.

Managing a large sum of money

I would say that I do not anticipate any large sum of money as we have been telling our mum to spend her money and we know she wasn’t able to save up much that she would have an inheritance for us. However, many baby boomers do have at least 1 property and this might be passed down depending on where you are located eg. Singapore HDBs are on a 99-years lease so it might have to be returned and will not be passed down as an asset whereas some freehold or overseas property would be for life as long as you have paid up for it.

It is important to learn to manage any sum of money that comes in as it is after all the fruits of labour or careful planning. With this asset transfer set to happen, many financial companies would be placing lots of emphasis on focusing on how to assist the high net worth individuals in preserving or even to grow their wealth. We can see many family offices coming into Singapore recently and there have been an influx. I will be sharing more on my next post on the number of HNWI (high net worth individuals making Singapore as their base).

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Sunday 20 November 2022

Reflections on why I started blogging and can it be a side hustle?

I started this blog in 2017 and started writing more often in 2018. I came across many inspirational bloggers like Investment Moats, Turtle Investor, My 15 Hour Work Week and many other more before I started. It was nice to see how they wrote about their thoughts and opinions, more importantly, they recorded their investments or progress using the blog.

It was nice reading about their journey, learning from them on investing and personal finance. When reading their updates, it felt like I was growing in terms of knowledge and information. So then, I decided to start my blog since I was going to start investing mainly to record and have a place to look back in 5, 10 and even 20 years as I record not just my investments but thoughts and reflections.

First post and cringe at reading it

My first post was released on Tuesday, 5 September 2017 on STI ETF where I started buying NikkoAM STI ETF using POSB invest saver. It’s very cringe as I read the short post, it had a lot of emotions in it as I can feel the excitement of me starting and seeing the price fluctuations. I was 22 years old then but I sounded like a 14 year old in terms of excitement like I just bought a new toy haha.

If I recalled accurately, I got my adsense account at the beginning of 2018 and in 2018, I wrote a total of 70 articles. 2019, I wrote 68 articles, 2020 was 85 and 94 in 2021. It was exciting writing in 2021 as the market was on an uptrend and everyday we were hitting higher highs. 2022 on the other hand, has been tough and not much motivation to write, we are nearly at the end of the year and I have written about 50 articles and I think it is unlikely for me to beat the record number of 94 but I am all right with that.

The blog is a place for me to collect my thoughts or mark certain special occasions or achievements. So there will definitely be good and bad years. Hoping to have the motivation to continue writing on the blog for me to look back.

Can it be a side hustle?

I believe blogging can be a side hustle as well as a full-time gig as long as you have substantial traffic or can live on the income that can come in different forms (eg, affiliates, ads earnings and others). However, I would say currently for me, blogging is definitely not able to sustain my lifestyle and it would still be more of a hobby for me than a side hustle.

There are some prominent financial bloggers in Singapore and I would say that the blogging can earn you money but in terms of the earnings based on ads, it is not very substantial but it can create a platform for affiliate earnings or to accept advertisements to share your thought depending if you are all right with the product. Turtle Investor does share his side income which is a broad categoery, not just blogging and everything can build up to a substantial amount.

To be honest, I would say that majority of the financial bloggers in Singapore do not create a blog thinking it will make them rich but more of wanting to share or have a platform to record their thoughts and journey.

I am definitely not at a level of knowledge where I can create courses to share but I am learning through my journey of investing and being able to have a platform to share is great as I find myself researching and reading up before organising my thoughts and writing it into an article.

The internet allows you to create content easily

A recent blogger that I am reading on is Financial Samurai as his career and journey is so out of the norm. Together with his many other investments, blogging on Financial Samurai forms one of his active/passive income. Content creation is very easily accessible now as everyone as long as they can afford a smartphone, can download social media apps and start creating content. TikTok has got to be the fastest and easiest way now with short form video content that everyone can scroll and access.

I am sure you would know that I have a YouTube channel too which I basically repeat the content I write but I read it out and use stock videos and footages. However, it is pretty tedious to edit and create a video as it needs to be recorded and edited so ultimately I still prefer writing as I can pen my thoughts and edit it just by reading through.

I do earn a very minute amount from the ads I post on my blogs and it does serve as some form of motivation but much more is to see the progress and mistakes made along my journey. Happy and grateful to have an avenue for recording all these!

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Friday 11 November 2022

FTX | My exposure and thoughts

*Many information regarding this event has not been verified and most of the information are known through twitter. SBF has not officially explained the whole situation although he mentioned that he screwed up and that Alamada will be winding up. So forgive me if information is wrong, do let me know and I will correct it accordingly.

 It’s been a crazy year for cryptocurrency, I don’t even know how Bitcoin is still 5 digits and ETH is 4 digits currently. I think there will be a lot more volatility as more dominos effect come as we see how big the effects of the downfall of FTX and Alameda is. It is really difficult to tell the whole story as there are many factors and versions but I am sure many have shared what really happened so for example Chain Debrief and Seedly.

What now?

SBF did explained on leaked messages that he is trying to raise some money however we don’t what is really going to happen now going forward. The dominos effect is huge as everyone wonders where all the money is at? FTX is huge being the 2nd/3rd largest exchange in the world for cryptocurrency. FTX going down means that customer deposits are gone and even investors money where Temasek is also in as well as Tom Brady. But the collapse of Alameda is also frightening as the exposure is not fully visible. So far, BlockFi seems affected and VC firm, Sequoia Capital is marking FTX investments as 0. Alameda is a quantitative cryptocurrency trading firm SBF founded and it has been speculated that FTX transferred customer’s deposits to Alameda for them to trade. There are really not much evidence coming out right now as no information have been mentioned by SBF although he had an apology twitter thread that he screwed up.

Lost some funds but managed to transfer out majority

From the LUNA crash, 3AC and Hodlnaut experience, I had transferred about 80% of my BTC and ETH to my cold wallet as trust is becoming tough in crypto. For my exposure to FTX, I lost an amount of Solana staked on FTX and about $50 USD. When twitter first speculated or had some tweets about CZ wanting to sell FTT, on 7 November 2022, I quickly transferred my remaining ETH and BTC out of FTX into my cold wallet. No way was I gonna risk it, although I did not think that FTX would collapse or be unable to adhere the 1:1 withdrawals, after all, SBF/FTX baited out many companies that suffered from the LUNA and 3AC implications and all along we have been reading on how he had billions of dollars. So definitely, FTX would not collapse so easily right? Well, it only just took a day for all to crumble as customers start withdrawing out and they were unable to match the withdrawals.

It is definitely painful when you hear of people who had substantial amount in FTX and are now unable to withdraw. It’s like they survive the majority of 2022 just to be crushed by FTX which is no foreign name to those in crypto. FTX was thought to be “too big to fail” in a way before this happened. Was it greed that caused this? I mean he was already loaded and there are just so many things that needs to be explained, lots of why. I did watch the Bankless podcast that SBF did with Erik Voorhee before this whole thing happened, it was a fierce discussion regarding regulation and I had to side more with Erik Voorhee especially so when we saw the tweets SBF made after the podcast. But things escalated and well, here we are.

Getting out of crypto?

2022 has been a mind-blowing year for cryptocurrency and the world. I really feel like I aged many years in terms of experiencing the ups and downs of cryptocurrency just in 2022. I did consider taking a break from crypto after the LUNA crash but to be honest, it’s tough when you see the builders and innovations. Especially when we saw the Ethereum merge that happened in August.

It took a long time for the merge and it finally happened. Amazing effort by everyone involved. Even now, it dampens your mood when someone who was supposed to be an advocate or had achieve substantial power and wealth from cryptocurrency suddenly does something weird and sabotages other retail investors. You would question on whether is it worth staying on.

I would say scrolling though twitter and catching up on crypto news has become a daily routine and quitting this will make my life less interesting? But for now, I prefer the boring investments, VOO, QQQ, BTC and ETH. That’s all and I won’t be chasing after any crazy gains. Switching onto Gemini to execute my buys. Hope everyone is doing well and let’s get over this, Christmas is coming right up!

Sunday 6 November 2022

Sit tight as we prepare for a period of hiring freezes and layoffs

With Elon Musk buying over twitter and announcing sweeping changes including layoffs affecting about 50% of it’s employees to reduce cost and turn profitable, the nightmare has just began for the tech industry as Stripe and many other tech companies are either preparing for hiring freezes going into 2023 or planning layoffs including Big Tech.

It’s crazy how the interest rate hikes and earnings results have brought such a huge blow to the tech industry, from the huge waves of record earnings in 2020 and 2021 to the incredible hiring packages offered to tech hires, it’s crazy how things are changing for the worse just within the span of less than 1 year.

Although I recently wrote an article on my pay raise, my manager just also brought up that there will be some reviews going on and is also unsure if anyone will be affected by it. I guess we can only wait and see how it goes. Companies are trying to cut costs and be able to survive through this period, letting go of employees is really painful especially so for employees as they face the uncertainty ahead of having a smaller available job pool and companies that have implemented hiring freezes or certain budgets for job positions due to the economy situation. Couple that with bills and mortgage including inflation, it is so much stress for an individual if they were to be laid off.

Read more: Getting a pay raise | Sharing my pay raise experience

Don’t overload yourself with a crazy mortgage

There are definitely some things to prepare which is having an emergency fund, reducing your expenses and even updating your resume to be prepared for job search if needed. I saw this tweet from Turtle Investor on that you should not over commit in terms of your property. This is definitely in terms of long term cash flow purposes to also help with retirement. Of course, some might say property that is bought at a good location or have various benefits means you will be able to sell it higher than your buying price but it really depends. We have seen many million dollars HDB sales and crazy renovation being done, I understand that working from home has raised everyone’s expectations of how their home should be as we spend much more time at home however over committing yourself doesn’t just affect you if you are laid off due to the larger mortgage but it drains your retirement amount especially so if you are using your CPF to pay your mortgage. The tweet and article link really explains why keeping your housing loan low helps your retirement planning.

Keeping/having a job is crucial and having cash flow in tough times helps

Of course, being able to keep or hold a job during the current tough times is not entirely up to us as we definitely would want to be employed but try to make sure that your role is crucial to the company or take on some projects that would need you so that you are considered "worthy" and you have a higher chance of staying on. Otherwise looking out for opportunities is also good.

It’s sound awful, having to scramble, talk and show your worth during tough times as the individuals who are thought to be doing or holding lesser job responsibilities will be let go or even at times, random. But that is life and I think being a business owner in current times is also very tough.

I was still studying during the 2008/2009 financial crisis so I wasn’t yet in the workforce but the many stories of people getting laid off as well as having trouble applying for their next job were painful to read. Many families went through financial difficulties and tough times when the sole breadwinner lost their job which means having to survive on leaner expenses and they had to downsize.

My family was lucky as my mum was still employed during that period so things were not as grim as what was shown and I only realised how lucky we were when I grew up and saw how bad some families were at that time as parents lost their jobs and some were unable to get back a similar paying job to pay bills and mortgage so they lost their homes. Being employed during this period would be a huge blessing and benefit as you would have cash flow to pay the bills and not stress about how you need to quickly find a job to sustain the commitments. Many would have an emergency fund in Singapore but we would of course tend to worry once we are laid off.

This will pass but we just don’t know when

A lot of things are definitely not within our control, I wrote that you should try to keep your job by showing that what you are doing is essential to the company/that you are an asset. Even so, you might still get the boot and most likely it is of no fault of yours especially when the company is cutting costs and it just so happens that your position was one of it.

If it ever happens to me, I would feel affected but I would try not to be too affected for an extended period of time as more opportunities are definitely out there. To end it off, I believe that this tough period will pass although we do not know when the end is, what we can do is to live life and do our best so that when it all ends, we can look back and think about how amazing we were to have survive through this. All the best to everyone!

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