Gold is now the biggest ETF on the Singapore exchange, and the case for owning some — debt, debasement, negative real rates — is everywhere. This piece does not argue that case or its opposite. It answers the question that comes after: which of the five ways to own gold fits the job you are hiring it for, and what does each one actually cost?
Our ShopBack account has returned S$6,484.09 over its lifetime — S$4,541.03 of it already withdrawn to the bank — for buying the same hotels, insurance and groceries we would have bought anyway. The entire system is one habit: start the purchase at ShopBack, then buy. Here is how we run it — the browser extension, the big-ticket bookings, the upsized-day calendar — and the one rule that stops a cashback app from quietly becoming a spending machine.
Singapore has around 34,000 unsold new private homes — developers’ stock, not resale. The figure is official, it is in every property headline this year, and it sounds like a warning about whatever you are viewing this weekend. It is also a national figure, and nobody buys the nation. We added up where the unsold stock actually sits, district by district — and it is nowhere near evenly spread. Three districts hold more than a third of it. Five have no active launch at all.
Everyone repeats the same rule: the suburbs pay you rent, the prime districts pay you prestige. We checked it across 26 of Singapore's 28 private districts and the relationship is not there — price and yield barely move together. What does move with yield is the size of the flats. The highest-yielding district in Singapore is in the city centre, and it is full of small apartments.
Half the property internet says good resale beats a new launch. The other half says new launches are the sure win. Both can point at real transaction data from the same source, and neither is making anything up — the answer reverses depending on where you start counting. Put both sides on the same basis and the whole advantage comes to about S$3,800 on a S$1.5 million home, against a S$44,600 stamp duty bill. Here is what is actually worth comparing instead.
Korean retail investors put billions into 2× Samsung and SK Hynix funds this June. Five weeks later, S$10,000 in that fund was worth S$1,351 — while the stock itself had merely halved. Yet on other markets the same structure made fortunes. What separates the two is not the product. It is whether you can sit through the path.
Singapore abolished estate duty in 2008, but US shares and US-domiciled funds above US$60,000 remain exposed to US estate tax of up to 40% — even in a Singapore brokerage account. An interactive look at how the rule works, and what changes it.
A stage-based framework for laying the financial foundations that matter most in your 30s — before chasing higher-return, higher-effort strategies.
