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

Finance

Living in One Country, Earning in Another

Singapore counts 183 days, Malaysia 182, Indonesia more than 183 — and all three count them over different windows, which is why the same year of travel can land you in a different place in each. Plus what a one-year work pass actually promises you, why a part-day in Malaysia is a whole day, what it costs to take your CPF out, and where the money really goes when you remit.

1 Aug 2026 · 9 min read

Finance

How to Read Your Payslip in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia

Every line on your payslip, what it actually is, who pays it, and which ones you can change. Including the Singapore deduction that is a default rather than a legal obligation — the CPF Board says so in writing, and almost nobody who pays it knows. Written after auditing our own payroll tools, one of which turned out to be two years out of date.

31 Jul 2026 · 11 min read

Finance

What Changed in the Statutory Rates This Year

If you earn S$60,000 in Singapore, your tax bill this year is S$200 higher on identical income — and no rate changed, no bracket moved, nothing was withdrawn. The YA2025 rebate simply was not extended, and a rebate that lapses produces no announcement and no change to any published rate table. That is the shape of most statutory change. The CPF ceiling finished its four-year climb in January, Malaysia's real moves landed eighteen months ago and are only now visible across a full year of payslips, and the charge that moved most is not a tax at all.

29 Jul 2026 · 8 min read

Sustainability

Solar Payback on a Tropical Roof

Malaysia gets more sun than Singapore, and our own calculator duly reported that a Malaysian roof paid for itself faster. Both the numbers and the ranking were wrong. Malaysia's true net metering ended in June 2025, and the scheme that replaced it in January credits exported power at the energy charge alone — about 61 sen on the ringgit — while Singapore pays roughly 73 cents on the dollar. Corrected for that and for what systems actually cost, the sunnier country takes about twice as long to break even. What a kilowatt-hour is really worth, why being out during the day is the expensive part, the three Solar ATAP rules no calculator models, and the component nobody quotes you.

29 Jul 2026 · 11 min read