Finance

How to Compare Unit Prices When the Shelf Makes It Hard

The large pack is usually cheaper per unit, and checking is one division — but the shelf is arranged so you cannot do it. Different units, hidden multi-buy counts, and the case that cannot be solved at all: comparing a jar sold by weight with a bottle sold by volume needs a density the label never prints.

11 Aug 2026 · 5 min read

Finance

Should I Pay Off My Loan Early? The Date Matters More Than the Amount

An extra payment does not buy a fixed amount of anything — what it buys depends almost entirely on when you make it. On a $300,000 loan at 4.50 per cent, the same $10,000 saved $26,696 paid in month one and $5,347 paid in year twenty. Here is the mechanism, the three things the arithmetic cannot settle, and what happened when we checked our own calculators against an independent model.

11 Aug 2026 · 7 min read

Finance

MAS Wants a 21-Day Path for Complex Funds. In May It Dropped the Advice Requirement.

MAS has proposed an Alternative Funds Appendix that would let a derivative-heavy or undiversified retail fund be authorised in about 21 days, once a category has been established over roughly three months. Consultation closes 10 August. Read alongside May's removal of mandatory advice for complex products, the direction is consistent.

8 Aug 2026 · 8 min read

Finance

GIC Says It Chose a Lower Return. Its Twenty-Year Number Fell to 3.4 Per Cent

Asked why the rolling twenty-year real return dropped from 3.8 to 3.4 per cent, the Finance Ministry pointed to a deliberate lower-risk posture. The window arithmetic is not separated out.

8 Aug 2026 · 8 min read

Finance

Is Rent Really Dead Money? What a Lease Costs You

"Rent is dead money" ends most rent-versus-buy conversations before the arithmetic starts, because it sounds like an accounting fact rather than a comparison with one side missing. Here is the missing side: a 99-year lease is prepaid rent with an expiry date, and if you hold to expiry, the price divided by the remaining years IS your annual cost of occupation — an identity, not a forecast. On the same $600,000, a flat with 43 years left consumes lease at 2.2 times the rate of one with 95, and that multiple is exactly 95 divided by 43. Add the duty and the interest, both as gone as any rent cheque, and the worked example reaches 29.2% of the purchase price.

7 Aug 2026 · 8 min read

Finance

When Does an HDB Lease Start Affecting Your Loan?

Lease decay gets filed with rising sea levels — real, distant, somebody's problem eventually. But the rule that actually bites is in force today: CPF usage and your loan limit are both pro-rated by whether the remaining lease covers the youngest buyer to age 95. Turn that around and a thirty-year-old needs a flat completed in 1992 or later to be financed in full. A 1992 flat is thirty-four years old. On an identical $600,000 price, the maximum loan falls by $152,308 between a 1992 flat and a 1970 one — and the CPF ceiling tightens at the same time, so neither can rescue the other.

7 Aug 2026 · 9 min read

Finance

Cap Rate, BRRRR and Which Property Metrics Travel

Cap rate, cash-on-cash and net operating income are arithmetic — they work on any building in any currency. BRRRR is not arithmetic. It is a bet on a tax code, and it was written in a country that taxes property the way Singapore very deliberately does not. The strategy is named for its fifth step, Repeat, and in Singapore a citizen's second residential property costs 22.7% of its price in duty against 2.7% for the first — money a refinance can never return, because no valuer appraises a tax receipt. Worked end to end on one $1.2m property, computed by the same engine that powers our calculator.

7 Aug 2026 · 11 min read

Finance

In February the BSP Said 70% Was Not Doable. In July It Said It Was Likely

The Philippine central bank's outlook on its 2028 digital payments target reversed in five months. The measurement underneath it did not change.

4 Aug 2026 · 9 min read

Finance

Keeping Crypto Records You Can Actually File

IRAS publishes a list of eight things your crypto records should contain. An exchange CSV gives you four of them, and gets a fifth subtly wrong. Meanwhile Singapore and Malaysia are asking whether you were trading, Indonesia is not asking about your gain at all, and the Indonesian rate changed a year ago — including in one of our own tools, until this week.

1 Aug 2026 · 11 min read

Finance

What a Car Actually Costs to Own in Malaysia and Singapore

A Singapore Category A COE closed at S$126,000 in July — roughly eight times the price of an entire new Perodua Myvi. Road tax on the same 1.5-litre engine is RM90 a year in Malaysia and S$682 in Singapore. And in February the rules on getting your money back changed so sharply that a car bought today is worth S$12,150 less at five years than the same car bought in January.

1 Aug 2026 · 9 min read