Do you plan for higher taxes in the future?

 

If you read books by US financial planners, you will find a massive gap in financial planning skills between local and overseas. My general impression is that books from the US can be pretty technical, and a lot of it goes into details like tax planning and coping with their social security systems. In contrast, Singapore financial planning books are clearly written by commissioned salesmen. If you compare the font size alone, you will conclude that our local sales folks have very little to say.

I actually blame the folks who set the CMFAS papers here. Those who take the paper can develop a reasonably deep understanding of a complex financial product like an Accumulator. Still, they don't examine candidates on concepts like standard deviation, much less create a sense of terms like skew and kurtosis.  

The Guru Gap goes way deeper than what local experts do when it comes to tax planning. In the US, it's not enough to avoid taxes via legal means; retirement planning based on the safe rate of return should also account for future taxes. This is actually quite prudent and logical in the US because financial planners believe that the US government's fiscal spending is not sustainable, and everyone needs to anticipate higher taxes on dividends and capital gains in the future.

So, my thought experiment for readers is to ask themselves this question : How will Singaporeans be taxed decades down the road when its time to retire and start spending our CPF-Life money ?

I'm going to attempt to answer the question here, but do chip and share your views because I don't think I have any expertise beyond the readers of this blog :

a) Income Taxes might actually drop

For a start, I don't think our government, with a budget surplus every election term, would want to penalise folks who put in a hard day's work in this country. So, the worst-case scenario is to maybe introduce a new tax bracket of 24% above an income over $640,000. And this is not done to balance our books; it is done to make society more equal. 

In fact, I think the non-tax bracket should be raised to $30,000 because starting salaries are so much higher today that we should be giving lower-income folks a bigger break.

Will this affect financial planning for retirees? That is unlikely, but if I'm right, you can put more money into SRS so that you can withdraw larger sums when you reach 63 years of age.

b) Wealth taxes

Singapore is a wealth hub, so taxing Singaporeans over their wealth is tantamount to killing our golden goose, but the government has an alternative to wealth taxes in the form of property taxation. Wealth taxes are popular and potentially can create a more equal society. As land is scarce, Singaporeans will happily tolerate a higher property tax provided that the taxes are small compared to the increase in the value of their property. But property taxes are extremely unpopular for folks who are asset rich and cash poor, like my family before I showed my dad how to invest for dividends.

I predict that the best mechanism for property taxation is to just elevate the Annual Value for each property. And bigger punishment will be confined to folks who own non-owner occupied houses. 

I project giving up 2 months of rent to tax authorities every year for folks who own a second residential property.

c) Investment taxation

Although it might sound self-serving, I doubt the government will not touch capital taxes or dividends as our stock market is not booming as much as our property markets. However, one area we need to be constantly vigilant about is the tax-haven status of REITs. Every five years, the government will need to review whether REITs that give out 90% of income as dividends can do so tax free. The next review is 2025.

If the review concludes that this tax status will end, REITs will then be subject to 17% corporate taxation - that is one piece of bad news. The second risk is that REITs will no longer be required to give out 90% of their collections, so some REITs will start to retain more of their earnings resulting in a bigger hit to your DPU. Done abruptly, this will tank the REITs markets for sure and destroy the many years we've spent to build out our hub status. 

Imagine losing 20-25% of dividend payouts if this occurs. 

(This has always been one of my ERM training slides although I never want it come true.)

Financial planners and bank relationship managers will be so happy if this occurs, because it means the end of many FIRE journeys. I doubt anyone will do professional financial planning like this, so please diversify your assets betweens banks, REITs, business trusts and blue chip businesses. 

d) GST

I actually believe that the government is not done even after raising GST to 9% and giving out vouchers to the poor to offset a drop in their standard of living. There is a certain savage beauty of GST in that it will hit anyone who buys something, as even a tutor who fakes his income tax statement still needs to pay 9% when he buys something from NTUC Fairprice. A small increase is also extremely consequential and can fund so many more social initiatives. We've also invested in an entire architecture of CDC vouchers to surgically target the recipients of future welfare schemes.

So i think a savvy financial planner should factor for at least a 10% GST in the future with a corresponding increase in the cost of living for a 65 year old.

Of course, as my readers are smart, they are free to have a different projection about future taxes, but I hope it impresses on everyone that projecting higher taxes in the future should be something a true blue financial advisor will do, but sadly why should they? 

They are just people licensed to sell you more financial products.