Getting Started: Saving for Retirement

Singaporeans are clearly ready to enjoy the good life when they retire. Many want to spend more time with their family, whether to help take care of grandchildren or catch up with children over a good meal or more. They also want to eat their favorite foods, engage in meaningful activities such as volunteering or helping in the community, or take classes. Some also want to travel so that they can finally visit places they have read so much about or reminisce on the good times they had in their favourite city.
 

A surprising number of elderly Singaporeans also plan to work. A survey last year by The Council for Third Age (C3A), an agency which promotes active ageing in Singapore, found that 40 percent of respondents plan to find part-time flexible work and 18 percent plan to start a new career.

The difficulty with retirement for many people, and a likely reason for the large number of people wanting to work, is that many of the elderly do not have enough money. Investment management firm BlackRock found in another survey, also conducted last year, that 72 percent of Singaporeans are concerned about being able to live a comfortable retirement. Nearly half of the respondents in the C3A Survey similarly said they were hindered in doing what they want because of a lack of money.

A significant reason for that shortage of funds, according to a survey conducted by Nielsen in September 2015 that was commissioned by Income, is that retirees between 60 and 70 years old say they’ve only saved about one-third of the funds they perceive to be sufficient for retirement.
 

One-third also said, not unexpectedly, that they are financially worse off than when they were employed. About 60 percent of these people said they cannot retire comfortably because they only started saving when they were about 45 years old, which was too late.
 

Compounding the issue, as Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said, is that “many Singaporeans in that older generation are asset rich and cash poor.” While their home may be valuable, it doesn’t provide any income unless they downgrade to a smaller flat, sublet part of it or sign up for a reverse mortgage.    

While younger Singaporeans say they plan to do better than older Singaporeans and are willing to save for retirement so they can live comfortably, turning that intention into action is difficult.
 

The Nielsen survey found 86 percent of Singaporeans between the ages of 25 and 35 are willing to set aside $300 a month to accumulate $1 million by the time they retire at 65. However, these respondents also said that prioritising retirement planning is impeded by short-term and mid-term financial commitments as well as a lack of knowledge about when and how to save. Many of them are either not saving sufficiently for retirement or not putting any money aside.
 

Moreover, 33 percent of non-retirees are not planning for retirement at all. 40 percent said the reason is a lack of understanding about the options available, while another 25 percent said they did not know how much is needed or when to start planning.

Once you change your spending pattern, you’ll start to have money to put aside for retirement. The earlier you start saving, the sooner you’ll be able to take advantage of compound interest, whereby interest is paid on interest and principal in the amount you save. If you put $10,000 into a fixed deposit at the age of 25 and earn 5 per cent for 40 years, you’ll have more than $70,000 when you retire at age 65. If you wait until you are 45 to put that $10,000 into a fixed deposit and only save for 20 years, on the other hand, you’ll only accumulate about $26,000.

Another option is to start earlier and save smaller amounts every month.  A 25-year-old who saves $100 per month, earning a lower rate of just 3 percent on the savings, could end up with more than $92,000 by the time he or she retires at the age of 65. A return of 5 percent would result in savings of more than $153,000.
 
Since interest rates on time deposits may be lower than 3-5 percent these days, an alternative is to take a little more risk and invest in shares. One option is to invest in shares of specific companies, and another is to invest in Investment-Linked funds such as the Singapore Equity Fund. A slightly lower-risk alternative is to invest in bonds, for example by purchasing a bond fund such as the Singapore Bond Fund or by buying Singapore Savings Bonds.

If you prefer regular annual or monthly income, you can consider an insurance plan such as Income VivoCash Prime, easily available online, which enables you to receive regular yearly income up to age 100.