Personal Wealth

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 [...]

“Well, what’s that?” the man bellowed while polishing his glassware. I peeked up sheepishly from my screen, still mashing buttons and beating up digital thugs. “It’s… a Steam Deck.” I braced [...]

Until today, Providend remains the only fee-only wealth advisory firm in Southeast Asia, a model inspired by the U.S. and Australia – why is that so? For the average person seeking [...]

The philosophy of sufficiency serves as the anchor for everything we do here at Providend—whether it’s planning for our clients, investing for them, or providing advice. Sufficiency is [...]

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 [...]

The terms ‘trusted’ and ‘financial adviser’ may be seen as a paradox by some. Some might even wonder, ‘Are there really financial advisers that can be trusted?’ Just how difficult is [...]

Good friends tell you important things that are pleasing to the ears. Best friends tell you important things that are not pleasing to the ears. It is in this spirit that I’d like to warn [...]

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 [...]

Did you know that Dave Butler, Co-CEO of Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA), was a former professional basketball player? Standing at over two metres tall, how did he come to and stay in his role at [...]

Against the backdrop of a challenging economic climate, the third quarter of 2023 witnessed a surge in retrenchments, leaving individuals grappling with financial uncertainties. Hopefully, the [...]

For most of us, the property we own is likely to be the most significant purchase we will ever make in our lifetime. From both a financial and psychological standpoint, it is also probably the [...]

It is inevitable to avoid crises or market downturns during your long-term investment journey. While we acknowledge that some turbulence is normal in any flight, it doesn’t guarantee our [...]

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, [...]

Living a Good Life: Choosing the Right Path Over the Easy Path “A lot of people have thought about happiness and what it means to have a good life, and I would subscribe to this: We only [...]

When I was much younger, I recall my mother’s sudden request for me to accompany her on an evening stroll. It was a puzzling invitation, but I readily obliged. After all, I was eager to mention [...]

Living a Good Life: Taking the ‘Shortcut’ to Filmmaking and Creativity “It’s not about the ability to retire but also how we utilise the time while we are on this planet. In the last [...]

More often than not, many investors assume that once they have completed their wealth plan when they are younger, they do not need to revisit it. However, this is not a reliable approach to [...]

It is Saturday evening, January 28th, and I find myself sitting with a group of close friends in one of their homes. It is still the Lunar New Year season, and we are having a game of Texas [...]

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 [...]

As wealth advisers, we are always searching for new ways to communicate well-established ideas in a way that helps clients visualise, understand, and internalise important concepts. Metaphors, I [...]

Living a Good Life: Lessons from Travelling 50 Countries on $3,000 “Some of the guesthouses are closed due to the pandemic, so I had to pitch a tent along the road to stay a night.” [...]

Earlier this year, I was on the beautiful islands of the Philippines. The sky was bright blue, while the rolling green hills set the backdrop for my holiday. To fully soak in the island [...]

Previously from other big financial institutions, Joyce and Zhi Han both coincidentally applied for an advisory role at Providend after watching this video where Christopher, our CEO, shares the [...]

At Providend, in order to help our clients achieve enough returns in the most reliable way to enable their life goals and life events, we started using the Ibbotson-Chen Model early this year to [...]

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 [...]

2015 was a very somber year for me. A series of events that happened reshaped the way I view my career in the financial services industry. Within a short span of two months, three of my clients, [...]

With the recent COE prices reported to be at an all-time high, the idea of owning a car in Singapore has become even harder to justify. In this episode, our Client Adviser, Ray Zheng, shares the [...]

In this fast-paced financial landscape where businesses are in pursuit of faster revenue, interactions between wealth advisers and clients are highly transactional such that the value is often [...]