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It has been a month since changes made to the CPF were announced and it has sparked many discussions on retirement planning which are still ongoing on mainstream media, digital media channels and [...]

For years, CPF members were able to “shield” the money in their CPF Special Account (SA) from being transferred to their Retirement Account (RA) by investing the money in excess of the first [...]

In 2010, after the Global Financial Crisis that caused many to lose their wealth, I had an epiphany to develop the “Philosophy of Sufficiency” for my firm. It is the philosophy that [...]

Welcome to the FIRST episode of Providend’s Money Wisdom Podcast Season 3! For this season, we are doing things a little differently in our sharing of money wisdom with you. We will be [...]

I was born five years after Singapore’s independence. My late father came from Malacca during his teenage years to work for the Singapore Traction Company, which ran trams. It was a blue-collar [...]

To conclude this book, I would like to first share the results of a survey and summarise what we have covered.  A survey was done in 2010 to understand the retirement journey of individuals (The [...]

So far, I have shared how we can use our proprietary tool, RetireWell™, to give our clients, Richard and Eva, a reliable income stream throughout their retirement.  However, retirement [...]

Once we have used the RetireWell™ tool and decided on the distribution of a retiree’s assets and the asset allocation for each portfolio, then we need to execute the investments well by [...]

In the past two decades, we have not used investment-linked policies (ILPs) when constructing investment portfolios for our clients because we do not deem them suitable. However, over the years, [...]

Here is part three, the final episode of our Providend Conversation with Jeshua, a 28-year-old who travelled during the COVID-19 pandemic to over 50 countries, navigating through the uncertainty [...]

The content of the last two chapters should be encouraging for any investor or retiree. If we invest in a broad, market-based portfolio in the right allocation, and stay invested for an adequate [...]

We are back with part two of our Providend Conversation with Jeshua, a 28-year-old who travelled during the COVID-19 pandemic to over 50 countries, navigating through the uncertainty of [...]

Once we understand that reliable investing is about capturing returns from the market rather than trying to outsmart all the other market participants, it becomes natural to then ask: Why do [...]

Now that we have secured a portion of the retirees’ desired income using the RetireWell™ Income Bucket, let us look at how we can invest the rest of their money in the other buckets to [...]

One of the key features of the RetireWell™ planning methodology is to have a portion of assets set aside with the aim of producing a fixed and constant stream of income, rain or shine. [...]

Over the past months, during the various webinars that I did, I have been asked this same question several times: How does Providend ensure that our client advisers always do the right thing for [...]

The mechanisms we discussed in the previous chapter are especially important because one of the key success factors to reach the financial aspects of our retirement goals is the ability to [...]

When it comes to retirement planning, it is important to consider two phases: accumulation and withdrawal. However, our experience has shown that more emphasis is often placed on the accumulation [...]

In this two-part episode, we are joined by Jeshua, a 28-year-old who travelled during the COVID-19 pandemic to over 50 countries, in a span of three years! He navigated through the uncertainty of [...]

When I first started my career in the financial services sector in the late 90s, comprehensive financial planning was not widely practised. Most of the time, it was really just product sales. I [...]

“When I was much younger, we used to stay at a much bigger place. We had two cars and two maids, then subsequently, we just had one car, no more maid, downsized a little bit and went to rent [...]

For the past 22 years, our CEO, Christopher Tan, has always been at the front line to share more about the humble beginning of Providend and how we persevered despite all the hardships faced to [...]

In the past 3 years, many studies on the value of advice have emerged. Fund managers like Russell Investments and Vanguard, as well as professional associations like CFA Institute and Financial [...]

“When you say people get free advice here, I laughed because in the end when you think about how this world works, nobody works for free. So you are paying for what you are getting somehow. [...]

From time to time, we will get this question about the way we manage wealth for our clients: “why should clients pay you an ongoing advisory fee if you take a “passive” instead of an “active” [...]

20 years ago, I wrote an article in this same column about the different ways financial institutions are compensated and their implications for consumers. Suffice to say, the industry, which is [...]

“There have been many bad money decisions because I know how to buy (stocks) but I don’t know how to sell!” In many industries like healthcare and legal, it is a norm for people [...]

Bonds are not typically the best asset class if there is unexpected inflation, but one type of bond which investors use to keep pace with the inflation rate is the Treasury Inflation-Protected [...]

We all know Kyith as the brain behind Investment Moats, Singapore’s most well read financial blog, but how much do we know about his motivations and money values that led him to where he is [...]

In the recent 3 years, we have witnessed a rise in the number of people coming to us for end-of-life, legacy, and estate planning. Perhaps they were reminded that death can happen suddenly, [...]