The Best Time to Leave Singapore to Study Overseas

 

Why O-levels, not A-levels, is the right exit point, and what it actually costs

Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li's The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China makes an argument that applies directly to Singapore, even though the book is about China. Their claim: the best age for a Chinese student to leave for the US is around 15, neither earlier nor later. Leave too early, and the child has not yet absorbed the discipline instilled by China's exam-driven system. Leave too late, and the child has spent so many years optimizing for a single test that they struggle to function in an American classroom built on discussion, initiative, and open-ended work. Fifteen is the point at which the discipline is already in place, and the capacity to unlearn a narrow test-taking mindset remains intact.

Singapore does not have the Gaokao. It has the O-levels. The structural logic is the same. The right exit point for a Singaporean student who wants to study overseas is neither before O-levels nor after A-levels. It is right after O-levels, at around 16.

Why O-levels are Singapore's equivalent inflection point

Singapore's education system compresses a similar kind of discipline into the years before O-levels: PSLE streaming, six years of secondary content, a national exam that determines the next track. A student who has gone through this and done reasonably well has already built the study habits, content discipline, and exam stamina that Jia and Li credit to the gaokao system. That is the raw material the book says is necessary for a move abroad to work.

Leaving earlier, at PSLE, does not clear that bar. A 12-year-old has not yet been tested on six years of secondary-level content, and the discipline the book describes has not yet been developed. The risk is a student who is neither disciplined by the Singapore system nor yet capable of self-directing in a more open one.

Leaving later, after A-levels, misses the window in a different way. By 18, the student has spent two more years inside a system that rewards the same narrow test-optimizing behavior, this time at higher stakes (H1/H2/H3 subject combinations, a single dominant score). The adaptation runway the book argues for, the two years of exposure to an open academic culture before the high-stakes stretch of a full degree, is gone. The student goes from one exam-maximizing system straight into another country's university, with no transition period in between.

O-levels sit at the point where the discipline is built, but the runway to adapt is still available. That is the argument, not a preference.

The complication the book does not have to deal with: National Service

This is where the Singapore case diverges from the China case, and where a generic transposition of the book's argument breaks down. For half of the affected population, the exit point is not a matter of free choice in timing. It is constrained by law.

Male Singapore citizens and PRs must register for NS at 16.5, whether they are overseas or not. MINDEF grants deferment for full-time studies up to A-level, IB, polytechnic diploma, or equivalent qualifications. It does not grant deferment for university studies. A son who leaves after O-levels to do two years of overseas high school (the US junior-senior years, UK sixth form, or an overseas IB) can get that deferment. What he cannot do is defer NS again once that pre-university stage ends. He has to return, enlist, and serve before starting an overseas degree program, or apply to defer his university admission until after his Operationally Ready Date.

In practice, this means a son on this path enters university at around 20 or 21 rather than 18 or 19. That is not actually worse than the timeline for a son who stays local and does JC (enlistment after JC also lands him at university around 20 to 21), so the O-level exit point does not cost a boy time relative to the local track. What it costs is continuity and reversibility. He has to leave an overseas academic and social environment midstream, return to Singapore for two years of NS, and then decide whether to return to the same country and system or pivot. Some overseas boarding schools and universities accommodate this; many international admissions processes are not built around a two-year interruption after acceptance.

A daughter faces none of this. She can go straight from O-levels through two years of overseas high school into an overseas degree without interruption, fully capturing the book's adaptation window. This is a real asymmetry in the decision, and it should change how a family plans for a son versus a daughter rather than being treated as a footnote.

What it costs

The book's argument is about timing and psychology. It says nothing about money because, in the China case, the constraint the authors are writing about is admission and adaptation, not affordability, for the families they are studying. In Singapore, cost is the binding constraint for most families weighing this decision, and the gap between staying and leaving is large.

Path	Two years pre-university	Degree	Rough total (SGD)
Local: JC + NUS/NTU	Fees for citizens are heavily subsidised, effectively negligible	~S$82,000 (tuition + living at home, 4 years)	~S$80,000–90,000
UK: sixth form + UK degree	International boarding sixth form, S$45,000–90,000 per year (S$90,000–180,000 for two years)	~S$257,000 (Warwick-level, 3 years, tuition + living)	~S$350,000–450,000
US: boarding school + US degree	International boarding school, S$70,000–105,000 per year (S$140,000–210,000 for two years)	~S$480,000 (MIT-level, 4 years, tuition + living); mid-tier private universities run lower	~S$500,000–700,000+

These are estimates, not quotes, and the range depends heavily on which school and university a student gets into. The point is the order of magnitude: a full overseas track from O-levels through graduation costs somewhere between five and eight times the local track, and that gap has to be funded by the family, since Singapore's MOE subsidy applies to local institutions, not to a private boarding school or an overseas university's home-country fee schedule. Government-funded scholarships (PSC, SAF, MOE teaching scholarships) can close this gap, but they come with a service bond, usually five to six years, which is itself a constraint on later career choices.

Advantages of leaving after O-levels

The case for this timing, beyond the discipline-and-adaptation logic above, comes down to four things. 

• First, two years is enough runway to adjust to an unfamiliar academic style (essay-based, discussion-driven, less structured than the O-level syllabus) before the stakes of a full degree. 
• Second, a student applying to competitive overseas universities from an overseas high school builds a more legible profile for holistic admissions: teacher recommendations from the target system, grading that the admissions office understands natively, and two years to build extracurricular depth, for which Singapore's JC timetable leaves little room. 
• Third, the student escapes the narrower H1/H2/H3 subject-combination logic of the JC system two years earlier, with more room to explore before committing to a major. 
• Fourth, two years of immersion builds language fluency, social capital, and local references that a direct university application from Singapore does not.

Disadvantages

Cost is the first and largest. The second is what the family gives up locally: the JC-to-NUS/NTU cohort is also a professional network Singaporeans draw on for the rest of their careers, and a daughter who leaves after O-levels forgoes it entirely; a son forgoes two years of it before NS reconnects him to a local cohort, but a different one from his secondary school peers. Third, the decision is less reversible than switching streams locally. If the adaptation does not go well (the discipline built by O-levels turns out not to transfer, which happens), the family has already committed a large, largely non-refundable sum. Fourth, some Singapore government scholarship pathways (PSC, SAF) are structured around completing A-levels locally; leaving after O-levels can preclude eligibility for them, unless the family is deliberately pursuing a different overseas scholarship route.

What should actually decide this, family by family

The book's framework, applied to Singapore, says O-levels is structurally the right exit point. Whether it is right for a specific family depends on four things that need honest answers before committing, not after:

1. Can the family fund S$350,000–700,000 without compromising retirement or other children's education, or does the plan depend on winning a bonded scholarship?
2. For a son: is the family prepared for the NS interruption (return at 18, serve, then resume overseas), and have the target school and university admissions processes been checked to confirm they accommodate a two-year gap?
3. Has the child actually demonstrated the discipline the O-level result is supposed to signal, or was the result carried by tuition and structure that will not exist overseas?
4. Does the target university's admissions process actually reward two years of overseas high school more than it would reward a strong A-level or IB result presented directly from Singapore? For some universities and courses it does. For others, a direct application at 18 gets a comparable or better outcome at a fraction of the cost.

Where all four answers are favorable, O-levels is the right time to leave, for the same structural reason Jia and Li give for age 15 in China: the discipline is already built, and the runway to adapt is still there. Where the funding is not secure, where a son's NS timeline has not been mapped against the target school, or where the O-level result was propped up rather than earned, the JC-to-local-university path remains the better bet, not because it is safer in the abstract, but because it does not require betting six figures on an unverified premise.

How to think about the Return on Education for degree programs in Singapore

 

The Polytechnic semester has ended, but I have to constantly remind myself that, thanks to blog readers and friends who also work at a Polytechnic, there are now young and impressionable readers of this blog, and it behooves me to make it a little more useful and wholesome for everyone.

So this week, I'll be sharing a powerful framework to think about the value of an education that everyone can benefit from.

This concept, known as Return on Education (ROE), is useful for comparing the value of different qualifications. It is useful for students in tertiary education to assess the value of a university degree, so they can compare a 4-year degree at a local university with other educational options.

I'm actually going to use my own students in this example.

According to a web search on salary data for Temasek Polytechnic Information and Digital Graduates, the median income is $2,950. Suppose the student is an elite graduate with a high GPA > 3.9 and is considering a Business+Computer double degree at NTU, which offers the highest starting pay of $6,950 after four years.

We use the formula to calculate ROE (ignoring the effects of NS):

(Degree Median Income / Diploma Median Income) ^ (1/degree duration) - 100%

We can compute the ROE as ($6,950/$2,950)^(1/4) - 100%, which is 23%.

23%, according to the Gaokao book, is exceptionally high. This is the equivalent of a China Gaokao student qualifying for a program at Beijing, Tsinghua, or Fudan University. 

Let's consider another scenario. 

If you have a Diploma in Humanities, your starting pay is even higher than that of an Infocomm graduate. It is $3,200. If you are aiming for a Humanities degree from NUS, the salary is $4,300, but it is also a direct honors program that lasts 4 years.

We can compute the ROE as ($4,300/$3,200)^(1/4) - 100%, which is 7.6%.

A 7.6% ROE is objectively low, as the average ROE for China and the US is expected to be consistently 10% for a professional degree.

And this is not even the worst-case scenario for young people contemplating the value of local degrees. 

An A-level graduate is worth about $3,600 in the industry. If this person is contemplating a Music degree at Yong Siew Toh Conservatory, they would also need to spend 4 years, with a starting salary of about $3,820.

We can compute the ROE as ($3,820/$3,600)^(1/4) - 100%, which is 1.4%.

I think there is a decent chance that if I teach my students maths this way, I might lose my job, but the numbers clearly show that not all local degrees are built the same way, and we need a reasonable framework to think about the value of an education instead of merely appealing to a person's love of learning when trying to pick a university degree.

In the first case, where the ROE is 23%, I can conclude that no investment products outperform investing in this NTU program. My students who qualify for the program should even be happy, even, to take out a loan to get that degree. This also means that achieving sky-high GPAs in a Polytechnic and competing the heck out of your peers is a rational move.

In the second case, where the ROE is about 7%, the choice is almost on par with an investment in equity markets. A rational parent can even reason that it's better to put the money in a diversified equity portfolio for their child and push them into the industry earlier in life. I teach law at a polytechnic to working adults, so I do not have visibility into humanities education in a polytechnic, but I predict that with an ROE of 7+%, the humanities environment would be more chill. ( Certainly less cut-throat unless someone figures out the ROE for law school.)

The final case is so irrational that voluntarily putting the funds into your CPF yields better returns, but this is where a deeper understanding of society is needed to explain the existence of music schools in Singapore. With an ROE below 2%, the qualification serves as a means for the truly wealthy to signal their indifference to their economic needs. At this stage, we stop applying economic principles and instead apply Pierre Bourdieu's Sociology of Distinction to our analysis.

Currently, both my kids are fairly advanced piano players, with my son regularly playing solo fr his primary school, but even I know this might be unsustainable as they get older. But I don't mess around when parents signal to me that their kid is some ABRSM Grade 8 and gunning for a music degree. 

In this society, it's a pretty substantial flex.

Why I did not date until my passive income hit $600 a month

 

Someone wanted me to elaborate on my idea that a guy shouldn't date until he has a source of passive income. 

So maybe I share a little bit of my story when I was starting out with the FIRE movement. 

In my twenties, there wasn't a FIRE movement, but I was acutely aware of what was likely to happen to me in my 50s due to the lack of folks in their 50s in an American MNC, so I started saving like crazy because the outsourcing wave had just started and companies were farming off their IT departments to benefit from labor arbitrage. In those days, ETFs did not exist, so my funds were mainly in a Templeton Global Equity Fund, which I eventually liquidated and transferred to a CDP portfolio of dividend stocks. 

Once I started collecting dividends, it became very natural to want a certain amount of money on average every month. I settled on $600 a month because it was my allowance during my university days. At that time, my benchmark-yielding stock was SPH, which yielded about 6%, so I just needed $120,000 in my CDP across various stocks and REITs that yielded about 6% to meet my target. 

Prior to hitting this target, I didn't really date during my single days because I didn't think I could be a good provider if I couldn't at least replicate my University allowance through an investment portfolio. At the very least, I just needed my investment income to pay for dates.

Looking back, now that I am in my 50s, a lot of the things I predicted have come true! 

Folks of my generation are losing their jobs to retrenchment exercises, and ageism practically guarantees that they will spend their days doing SkillFutures courses and watching their savings dwindle before finding a job that pays half as much.

So recently, I've doubled down on this idea. 

I think Gen Z is in a transitional phase where guys are still expected to play the role of provider, but women are becoming more financially independent, and jobs are no longer as stable as before. Right now, some kind of new masculinity is still a work in progress, so guys still need to man up and play a provider role. And, I suspect in practice, throughout a marriage, both spouses may have to endure periods of unemployment throughout their working lives, but guys stand to take a larger hit to their egos if they can't play the role of a provider in a family unit.

To make things more interesting, I'm going to borrow some software engineering concepts from this excellent book, which I'm currently obsessed with, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, which is rapidly becoming the go-to book for casual-vibe coders looking to level up to senior-level engineering skills. 

The book distinguishes between a fault and a failure. 

In an array of hard disks in a RAID-5 arrangement, one hard disk failure is a fault. It can be replaced with no real system outage because RAID-5 is fault-tolerant. Just pull the hard disk out and put a new one in, and you're good to go. However, if two hard disks fail in a RAID-5 array, we have a failure because recovery is impossible without replacing hardware, followed by tape recovery.

So you can recover from a fault painlessly, but generally, failures can be events that you might not recover from.

Taking this back to family economics, in an ideal world, both spouses work, but if one spouse gets retrenched, it is just a fault in the system, and the family can recover so long as one spouse can hold the fort while the other finds a job. 

But in practice, traditional norms ensure that if the wife loses her job, it's a fault that can be overcome. But if the husband loses the job, it's a failure. We see that many divorces are triggered by a lack of economic means on the husband's part or his inability to keep up with the wife's capabilities.

So if this observation is true, then the husband must develop fault tolerance internally.

The most basic approach is for the husband to generate multiple sources of income. This can be created with rental property, blue-chip stocks, song royalties, or a side hustle. The best source of side income should be passive, because you still have a day job to take care of. 

So I think a young man should ask himself how much he will need to eke out a bare-bones existence living with his parents. Calculate the minimum amount of expenses you need. I think you can squeeze by on $500 a month. 

Now, to generate this amount a month using a portfolio that yields 4%, multiply the number by 300. So, to generate $500 a month at a 4% yield, you will need $150,000 (300 x $500). The numbers look daunting at first, but if you can get $30,000, your monthly income will be raised by $100 a month, making the next $100 much easier to achieve with the salary raises you made along the way.

Of course, imagining that you can live on $500 a month is not enough. 

We have to test it in a business continuity planning exercise.

While holding onto your job, you might want to just completely save your entire salary and set aside monthly expenses of just $500 just to see if you can survive on that.

Should young men who read this article follow my lead and refrain from entering the dating market until they have a passive income stream?

With AI disrupting the workplace, I think even if the young man refuses to ever enter the dating market, he needs a source of income if he finds that his skills are no longer valuable in the job market. 

And young women, too, because the income from Gen Z guys is hardly reliable these days.

The Four Types of Singaporean Investor: Why the "Safest" One Might Be the Riskiest

Ask ten Singaporeans how they're investing for the future, and you'll get ten different answers: a crypto wallet here, an ETF portfolio there, a stack of bank and REIT counters, or a shrug and "I'm just focused on my career right now." Look closely, and discounting the sophisticated investors who like to flex their alternative assets, and those answers collapse into four recognizable archetypes, each with its own relationship to risk, time horizon, and definition of "winning". Three of them know they're taking a risk. The fourth doesn't realize it's taking one at all, which is exactly what makes it dangerous.

1. The Speculator: Chasing the Fast Buck

At one end sits the get-rich-quick trader, drawn to crypto tokens, contracts for difference, and leveraged options, hoping to compress decades of returns into months. This group tends to be younger, chronically online, and quick to mistake volatility for opportunity. The wins get broadcast on Telegram groups and TikTok; the losses are quietly absorbed.

The numbers suggest this crowd is larger than it looks and more nuanced than the stereotype implies. A 2025 Coinbase x MoneyHero survey of over 3,500 respondents found that 61% of Singapore retail investors now hold some cryptocurrency, yet average allocations were a conservative 6-12% of their portfolios, and 58% described themselves as long-term holders versus 22% who identified as active traders. In other words, most people who own crypto in Singapore aren't the archetype: they've bought a small position and left it alone. The true speculator is a narrower, louder subset: the trader who treats derivatives and leveraged tokens as a primary income strategy rather than a small satellite position.

It's not that speculation is inherently irrational. SGX itself runs a substantial derivatives franchise, and options and futures serve real hedging purposes for sophisticated investors. The trouble is that for the retail speculator, position sizing and risk management are usually the first casualties of the chase for a fast buck. A trade that would be a reasonable 2% hedge for an institution becomes a 50% bet on a single altcoin for a 24-year-old trying to skip the queue to financial freedom.

2. The Builder: Quietly Compounding Through Low-Cost ETFs

A second, more disciplined group has emerged over the last decade: the savvy careerist who treats investing as a payroll deduction rather than a hobby. They dollar-cost average into low-cost, broadly diversified ETFs (a Straits Times Index tracker, a global equity fund, sometimes a REIT ETF for local income flavor) and largely ignore the noise in between.

This is no longer a niche habit. SGX-listed ETF assets under management hit S$16.3 billion by Q3 2025, up 40% year-on-year, and the SPDR STI ETF (ES3) alone pulled in roughly S$387 million of net inflows over the year, at a total expense ratio of just 0.28% a year. CPF and SRS investors have become one of the biggest forces behind this growth, funneling forced or tax-deferred savings into the same handful of low-cost, broad-based funds month after month.

Their edge isn't stock-picking skill; it's a stable income, a long horizon, and the discipline to automate the decision so emotion never gets a vote. This is the group financial educators spend the most time trying to grow, because it's the one strategy that scales to the average person without requiring either luck or genius: you don't need to correctly call the next hot sector; you just need to keep buying the whole market and get out of your own way.

3. The Income Seeker: Living Off Dividends

Then there's the old-school investor, typically further along in their career or already retired, who built a portfolio of blue-chip dividend payers (banks, REITs, telcos) specifically to generate a spendable income stream. For this group, share price appreciation is almost beside the point; what matters is whether the dividend cheque covers the month's expenses.

The appeal is easy to understand: a basket of well-run Singapore REITs is currently yielding in the 5.5-6%+ range, comfortably ahead of the roughly 3-3.5% yield on 10-year Singapore government bonds, and paid out quarterly or semi-annually like clockwork. For someone who has already accumulated capital and simply wants it to pay them a salary, that's a compelling proposition.

It's a philosophy suited to a low-growth, income-hungry stage of life, though it carries its own blind spot: chasing yield can concentrate a portfolio in a handful of rate-sensitive sectors, and a payout that looks safe on a dividend calendar can still get cut when the underlying business (a hospitality trust in a downturn, a retail landlord facing an anchor tenant's exit) hits a rough patch. A high yield is sometimes the market's way of pricing in a risk the investor hasn't priced in yet.

4. The Ignorant Masses: Betting Everything on a Single Career

The fourth group barely considers itself "investing" at all, which is exactly the problem. This is the mass of Singaporeans who pour their financial energy entirely into a single career, climbing the corporate ladder, chasing promotions and bonuses, while treating that income as the only asset that matters. It feels safe because it's familiar and within their control, but it's really a concentrated, undiversified bet on one employer, one industry, and their own continued health and employability, with no hedge if any of those three falters.

2025 gave this group an uncomfortable reality check. Singapore recorded 14,490 retrenchments, up from 12,930 in 2024, with the incidence rate climbing to 6.3 per 1,000 employees. PMETs (the professionals, managers, executives and technicians who make up exactly the "safe career" crowd) were hit hardest, with a retrenchment rate of 10.1 per 1,000, up from 8.6 the year before and above pre-recessionary averages, concentrated in financial services, info-comms and professional services. A retrenchment, an industry downturn, or a health scare exposes just how little of their financial life was ever actually diversified, because the career was never a separate asset from their income; it was the only asset.

Same Spectrum, Different Blind Spots

These four types map onto a spectrum of risk awareness, not risk tolerance. The speculator takes on visible risk in pursuit of outsized reward, and at least knows it: nobody puts money into a leveraged token thinking it's a sure thing. The builder and the income seeker each manage risk through a defined strategy suited to their life stage: accumulate broadly while young, tilt toward income as retirement nears. The career-only saver, by contrast, carries risk they don't even recognize as risk, which is precisely why it's the hardest of the four to fix: you can't diversify away from a danger you don't believe exists.

The healthiest financial life for most Singaporeans probably borrows a little from the middle two archetypes: steady, diversified accumulation in the working years via low-cost ETFs, gradually tilting toward dividend-paying income as retirement nears, while treating both blind speculation and blind faith in a single paycheque as two versions of the same mistake: concentrating your entire financial future in one bet and calling it safe because it's familiar.

Happy National Day ! Let's talk about something that stresses you

 

This National Day, I want to talk about what I know about education systems.

When scholars from China are asked about books that shaped the country's evolution, they often point to books about Lee Kuan Yew. So this National Day, I'm going to talk about this book entitled The Highest Exam, which really taught me how to think about Singapore and the way we structure Singapore society.

For a start, the Chinese have been taking Imperial exams for thousands of years; this is a timeline that is way longer than that of the Chinese Communist Party or Singapore, for that matter, so countries with a large population of ethnic Chinese would naturally try to structure society using what the book describes as a "centralized hierarchical tournament".

The version of this tournament in China is the gaokao, one of the most gruesome exams in the world. Singapore's PSLE is also a centralized hierarchical tournament, but even some mainland influencers consider making 12-year-old kids go through our version of gaokao to be exquisitely cruel and would remind PRCs thinking of settling down in Singapore that our academic system is no cakewalk either.

From the Chinese perspective, the Gaokao is a great system because it measures everyone based on a single, transparent standard. In a corrupt society where money can buy favors, this is probably a better alternative than the US system, which prefers a multi-dimensional, holistic assessment criteria that can be gamed with money. Consequently, the proportion of urban elites in places like Beijing and Tsinghua University is smaller than in places like Harvard and Yale, which welcome legacy admissions.

Of late, the Chinese have been expressing some regret over their system. 

This is because the Chinese now feel that the latest Fields medallist, Prof Wang Hong, was only able to win the award after she left Chinese academia and settled in France. The academic environment in China may mean that she would be constantly overlooked, and some of her research might actually be stolen by her superiors, as she has stayed.

But the Western system has its own hobgoblins. Look no further than Cambridge Professor of Sociology Jason Arday, the DEI wunderkind, who is also a plagiarising fantasist.

Looking at the lenses through which the Gaokao matters, I can now see why the PSLE makes sense to us. Even though we are not (that) corrupt, a tournament gives everyone some kind of a hedge in case corruption rears its ugly head in the future. It's also a powerful way for the government to determine what is rewarded in society in the future.

How can we improve the system?

Right off the bat, eliminating the T-Score in favor of Achievement Levels does nothing for parents or kids because the PSLE remains a centralized, hierarchical tournament. I might even argue that A levels would be even better if they were T-scores, as that would provide greater transparency in determining who gets into top professions.

Reforms would be better if we examined the ITE and Polytechnics,  and disabused this notion that investing in Poly and ITE is like "throwing good money after bad," as allegedly said to the Education Minister in the 1990s by Tony Tan.

If the median GPA of a polytechnic graduate is higher than that of a university A-level graduate, then it makes sense to reduce A-level intake and increase polytechnic intake for that degree course. I'm seeing decent ITE students performing in a polytechnic, and perhaps a similar adjustment can take place for those few elite diploma programs.

So any alternative to the A-level system should not be another centralized tournament like the IB (which is like rich people paying to avoid A-levels by picking an easier alternative); it should be a brutal tournament based on a single score, with exams designed locally. The most direct road to a middle-class lifestyle and a profession should remain a tough road of pain and struggle.

On the other hand, Poly and ITE can have their own assessment systems, and universities need to constantly adjust their admissions based on alumni performance. Continuous assessment, project work, and skills development, rather than a winner-takes-all exam, should be a valid option for smart, ambitious Singaporeans to achieve a middle-class lifestyle. Our universities should also consider alternatives to the PhD. Keep two research universities, but some kind of new accreditation system should award doctorates for practical inventions, patents, and even for producing jobs for the economy.

Finally, I don't think any educational reform can address the major lack of social and cultural capital among Polytechnic students compared to JC students right now. This has always been a problem hidden in Singapore. Despite many attempts to make our society more inclusive and equal, we can only measure things like salaries and personal wealth.

Parents are not dumb. If my child does well in both JC and Poly and eventually gets into a University, I will still choose the option that exposes them to more peers who may end up as doctors, lawyers, or businessmen. And even with a strong social network, some environments simply allow a person to develop better "taste".  

Policy makers have a tough nut to crack.

The curious case of Colin Lau's Early Retirement

 

When the video about Colin Lau came out, a lot of friends forwarded it to me. Some folks even mentioned that there's now someone to give me a run for my money, even though there are folks like AK71 and Investment Moats who probably have a safer financial margin than me.

I thought it might be useful to blog about the strengths of Colin Lau's approach to financial independence and its inevitable weaknesses. I'm not coming from a position of being a critic; I actually think that Colin Lau's work is admirable, and it is a sad waste that the media took a while to recognise his effort doing charity work for the Philippines.

So here's what I think are the key takeaways:

a) You do not need to be rich to be financially independent

Colin's technique is hyper-frugal but also relied on the economic situation during the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2009. In 2007, at 35, Colin bought a S$87,000 three-room flat with about 64 years left on the lease, paid in full, with no mortgage, since he felt loans "lose a lot of money." He rented out a room for S$900/month, which paid off the flat's cost within eight years. He still collects that rent today, and the flat has since appreciated in value.

b) You don't even need to buy stocks if you can minimise your personal expenses

He saved 80–90% of his income during his working years ("Everybody was spending money like water, I was spending like a test tube"). He now lives on under S$150/month, with total monthly cash flow of about S$2,500 (rental income plus insurance payouts bought when younger). He's saving the surplus for future eldercare, since he's a bachelor with no children. His philosophy: don't pinch pennies on small stuff; instead, cut the big-ticket items like housing.

This is a number that no one in my family can live on, not even my kids, because they have enrichment. Amazingly, Colin does not employ equities because all it takes is a 5% dividend stock portfolio of $36,000 to generate $150 cash flow every month on average.

c) You still need to do a bit to take care of your health

A serious health scare in June 2025 left him hospitalised for 62 days with 15 surgeries and a S$146,000 bill that is covered fully by insurance and subsidised ward class, so he paid nothing out of pocket. I'm actually surprised that he is willing to pay for some kind of insurance plan. 

Nevertheless, I think his planning and possible C/B2 class ward stay are the reasons why he's still alive today.  I can't help but feel quite sorry for him after looking at this episode.

Of course, this video raises a lot of questions as to whether someone can find a tiny little flat to live in without paying for a home mortgage. I doubt it's possible if you want a remaining lease of 60+ years, but if you are in your 60s and want something with less than 40 years, it might be possible. Also, I suspect the government may allow low-cost rental housing for singles in the future, so it's possible to build a dividend portfolio to pay off the rent for a one-room flat. Whatever it is, Gen Z would need to find a creative solution to replicate the same results.

Finally, there's no way to sugarcoat this, but Colin Lau is making the same mistake as the other ultra-frugal FIRE thought leaders in Singapore, all of whom are frugal single men.

What is he going to do to deal with loneliness when he gets older?

I think charity work is an important component of having a meaningful life, but being frugal to the point of remaining single might mean a lonely existence when you enter your 70s or 80s. There are some things that having a family and children can do for you - if you need to go for an operation, at least your kids (if raised well) will be there for you.

You can Google the number of deaths from loneliness; it kills at three times the rate of heart attacks. And men tend to be even lonelier than women as they get older.

But no FIRE blogger really wants to blog about the endgame when they hit their 70s; they just want to showcase their frugality porn on the web.

How an investor can benefit from the Feynman Technique

 

I still get a lot of questions about why I teach. 

It's always a variation of the question, like, "If you have such a successful formula for investing, why do you want to share it with others?" 

For quite a while, I argued that by teaching the subject deeply, I am forced to progressively simplify the concept and understand it based on first principles; this is further honed by serious students with genuine questions who expect answers because they pay top dollar to attend my Masterclass.

Now, with AI and teaching an actual Data Analytics class, things have gotten crazier.

It's no longer about deepening a person's understanding when a lecturer teaches a subject. The lecturer can build something in real time to test the theories they learn and see whether it holds up in reality.

So here's a concrete example. 

One of the things my students have to do is linear regression; they might need to figure out which attributes result in better fitness, like lower blood pressure. For every topic I teach, I ask myself how to make it relevant to me and incorporate it into my Portfolio Manager Windows program, which I vibecoded using Claude Code.

So I tried to create a simple regression that looked at just stocks in my portfolio and determined whether a PE ratio and dividend would affect investment gains after a year. And I can see that a low PE ratio resulted in superior performance, but the high dividend stocks in my own portfolio would actually drag down returns after a year.

Upon closer examination, the reason is less dramatic; the outperformers in my portfolio are the AI Tech stocks on SGX like UMS, AEM and Frencken. With the exception of Frencken, I owned these counters when they were still dividend stocks a number of years ago.

Another thing I make my students do is to conduct K-means clustering. It employs an algorithm to divide a data sample into K parts. It's like dividing the class into 5 groups using AI based on the data fed to it, so that insights can be gleaned from this categorisation.

So when I teach this topic, I try to get my students to use their intuition to make a case for how the categorisation is done ( groups like "Fit Daddies" or "Bored Tai Tais" using gym data). It is not an easy task because it's highly subjective.

So after teaching, I began to eat my cooking and tried to cluster the stocks in my portfolio using stock ratios, and it somehow grouped banks with stable REITs, the Tech-based growth stocks, and high-yielding REITs with less prestigious sponsors. More interesting is a cluster of orphan stocks that include First Shipping Trust, Global Investments and, probably unjustified, Capitaland India Trust. 

Where analysis can be done, data can be ingested in a built-in AI chatbot. 

So, I've gone even further and given my software chatbot capabilities to answer questions about what I should do with my portfolio. In this example, the AI tells me to ditch ESR REIT for Sabana REIT.

My journey continues; this article is to get folks to look out for a future video on whether AI can replace Financial advisors with the good folks of The Financial Coconuts. I suspect the video might not do that well because it is easily one of the most technical talks I've ever done.