Clear thinking for life abroad

A practical week-by-week financial checklist for expats in their first 90 days in Singapore: cash, pensions, tax residency, insurance and planning.

Ask a baby boomer what retirement means and you will often hear about a date: the day you stop work, collect the pension and start the next chapter. Ask a millennial and you will hear more doubt about whether the system will be there. Ask someone in Gen Z and the answer is more likely to be about freedom, flexibility and not being forced to depend on a single employer or a single source of income. Each view makes sense. They come from very different starting points. Understan

Many expats earn in one currency, spend in another, hold savings in a third, and plan to retire somewhere else again. Every one of those gaps is a currency decision, even if you never made it on purpose. Currency risk is not something you can remove completely. The aim is to understand it, so that exchange rates do not decide your plans for you. Three currencies, three questions Where do you earn? Your salary, bonus and any equity are already tied to one currency. Where will

If you are a UK national living in Singapore, you probably left behind an ISA, a workplace pension, and maybe a handful of other UK accounts. Some of them keep working for you. Others quietly stop. Knowing which is which is worth doing in your first year, not your fifth. This is a general overview. UK rules change and individual cases differ, so treat it as a starting point for your own checks. Your ISA: keep it, but you cannot add to it You can keep an existing ISA open afte

Most expats arrive in Singapore with a plan for the first year and no plan for leaving. Then a job ends, a visa changes or a family decision is made, and there are a few weeks to organise a move that touches your tax, pensions, investments and insurance. Leaving well is mostly about doing things in the right order, and starting early. This is a checklist for the last year, written for professionals returning home or moving on to a third country. 12 to 6 months before you go D

Singapore's tax system is one of the reasons expats move here: no tax on capital gains, no tax on most dividends, and a top income tax rate that is lower than many home countries. But all of it depends on one question that many new arrivals never check: are you a tax resident? This is a plain-English overview of the basics. It is general information, not tax advice, and the rules can change. Who counts as a tax resident Stay or work in Singapore for 183 days or more in a cale

On S$500,000 invested for 20 years at the same 6% gross return, the difference between paying 1% a year and 2.5% a year is about S$332,000. Same markets, same money, same time. The only thing that changed is the cost. Fees look small because they are shown as percentages. A 2.5% charge sounds like a rounding error until you see what it does to a portfolio over two decades. The worked example This is an illustration, not a forecast. It assumes a single S$500,000 investment, a

Moving to Singapore with a UK pension? Here is what happens to it, what your options are, and what to check before you transfer, leave it or draw benefits.