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Plan your children tertiary education early

For many new parents, the cost of buying milk powder, toys and clothes seems to be the first thing that comes to the mind.

There is one thing that most parents has overlooked – children’s tertiary education.

Everyone has been through this stage of life and has obtained your Degree and Diploma. If your parents have funded your education, are you aware of how much it has costs? For those who funded your own education, i am sure you know it is no small amount.

Now that you are a parent yourself, wouldn’t you want to be able to fund for your children education needs and not deny him or her the opportunities to at least obtain that piece of paper in a highly competitive society of Singapore?

If you have not start to save for your children education, start now.

Time value of money will compound and grow and multiply this pot of money. You will be surprised that stashing away a small portion of your money every month can grow to something significant 20 years later.

The question is how much do we need to put away?

First, we need to find out how much it costs for a tertiary education now and how much it will cost 20 years later after adjusting for inflation.

Base on a 3-years business course, the estimated* figures are illustrated in SGD in the table below:

Country	Tuition Fees	Other Expenses	Total
Singapore	$27,750	$2,000	$29,750
Australia	$108,276.60	$84,990	$193,267
UK	$99,827.28	$126,036	$225,863
US	$78,000	$112,320	$190,320

If we assume a 5% education inflation, the expenses in 20 years time worked out to be:

Country	Total Expenses
Singapore	$78,936
Australia	$512,795
UK	$599,282
US	$504,976

The figure are startling but that should discourage you to start saving for your kids.

By saving i don’t mean stashing away in your bank’s saving account as the low interest environment is not going to let you achieve the numbers above.

If you’re financial savvy, do a ‘110 minus your age‘ stocks portfolio. If you are not, stick your money with STI ETF.

If we assume your investment performance to be in line with education inflation of 5%, you would need to set away approximately $15,000 a year to get around half a million 20 years later.

Therefore, it is important that parents should start to plan for you children tertiary education early.

(* The numbers are estimated and factors like exchange rate fluctuation, variable education inflation and choice of school may not reflect the figures above)

25 Highly Paid Jobs in Singapore

When you are in school, you have always heard that doctors and lawyers are highly paid. You buried yourself under the books for years hoping to achieve the grades that let you enter either the Medical or Law School.

Have you wondered how much they earned? Are there any jobs that are also bringing in the big bucks?

We list down the top 25 best paid jobs across all industries in Singapore.

1. Specialist Medical Practitioner (Medical) $21,595
2. Specialist Medical Practitioner (Medical) $20,348
3. Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer $18,000
4. Trade Broker $14,781
5. Chief Operating Officer/General Manager $12,000
6. General Practitioner/Physician $11,384
7. University Lecturer $11,371
8. Commodities Derivatives Broker $11,240
9. Company Director $10,899
10. Ship Broker $10,660
11. Foreign Exchange Dealer/Broker $10,000
12. Software and Application Manager $9,900
13. Legal Officer $8,573
14. Lawyer (Excluding Advocate and Solicitor) $8,500
15. Chief Information Officer/Chief Technology Officer $8,300
16. Financial/Insurance Services Manager $7,929
17. Risk Analyst (Financial) $7,708
18. Treasury Manager $7,558
19. Network and Communication Manager $7,435
20. Research and Development Manager $7,391
21. Policy and Planning Manager $7,105
22. Technical/Engineering Services Manager $7,023
23. Marine Superintendent Engineer $7,000
24. Budgeting and Financial Accounting Manager (Including Financial Controller) $7,000
25. Managers $7,000

Is your dream occupation in the list?

(This list is compiled based on median income listed on MOM’s Occupational Wage Table, 2012)

How to save on your electricity bills

Before we go into the various methods on how to save electricity bills, let us find out what are the appliances that consume the MOST electricity.

According to the National Environment Agency (NEA), the three appliances that consumed the most energy are air-conditioner, water heater and refrigerator – with the former consuming the most electricity.

If that is really the case, what should be done to reduce the consumption?

Lets find out!

1. Set your air-conditioner thermostat to 25°C or higher

Singapore is a humid place and at times it can get really hot and stuffy in a room. Use the air-con if you wish, but you don’t need to turn your room into a Nordic country by setting your thermostat below 20°C to be comfortable. Set the temperature to 25°C or higher. Do you know that for every degree raised, you save an estimated of $15/year? If you can replace your air-con with a fan, bring your family out for a feast at the end of the year with the moola saved.

2. Reduce the use of heat-emitting appliances

Heat emitting appliances like iron, hair dryer, tumble dryer, induction stove and water heater uses lot of electricity. Here’s how to reduce the use of each appliances.

A. Iron
Instead of ironing clothes, try this – hang your clothes on plastic hanger and place them in the bathroom when you take a hot shower bath. Make sure the window and everything is close so that steam stays in the room. It takes about 10-15 minutes for your clothes to be wrinkle-free.

B. Hair Dryer
If you have long hair, drying it after a shower is a pain. Hair-dryer will usually do the trick but it is actually one of the main culprit for inflating your electricity bill. Try using a super-absorbent microfibre brush to comb your hair after a shower or wrap it up with a microfibre hair turban.

C. Tumble Dryer
Of course, you can hang your clothes on the traditional bamboo stick method. It’s the best method that does not consume any electricity. Also make sure you use the high-spin method on your washing machine as the electricity used to create the extra spins will be less than the electricity used to generate heat from a tumble dryer.

D. Induction Stove
Use a gas stove if safety is not an issue.

E. Water Heater
There are a few ways to save electricity consumed by the water heater. Here’s a few:
Use a smaller size heater because electricity consumed is based on the amount of water heated. Switch off your water heater immediately when not in-used. Keep thermostat at medium level and use heat insulating water pipes to prevent heat loss. Lastly, if you want to save water and electricity, go to Sembawang’s Hot Spring.

3. Fill up your refrigerator’s empty spaces

Who say less is always going to save you more money? For a refrigerator, it works the other way. First, you need to understand some physics on how heat moves in air. Air is dense and not a good conductor of heat, thus they moved by masses of warm and cold air trading places. In an empty fridge, lots of trading takes place when you open your fridge. If it is full, heat can only be transferred by conduction.

You can fill up your fridge with jug of waters, ice packs, or any empty containers and bottles so that there is no room for hot air to enter and replaces the cold air – which saves the energy to pump the extra heat out of the refrigerator.

4. Use a LED TV instead of a Plasma TV

A Plasma TV consumes more electricity than a LED TV because electricity is used to charge up every gas cell in a Plasma TV whereas in a LED TV, the light is independent and shared across in an efficient way.

A Plasma TV also generates more heat than an LED and if you keep your air-conditioner on the entire day, it uses more electricity to cool the room temperature.

5. Off appliances on standby mode

Appliances on standby mode contributes about 10% of a household energy use. Turn them off when not in use. Common items are laptop, TV, radio and heater.

6. Submit your own meter reading

Once every two months, SP Services will send someone to read the electricity meter located outside your house. The readings are estimated on months that meters are not read. To prevent overcharging, you can actually submit the reading yourself online to via their phone services.