Sgwealthplanner by Royston Tan

The saying goes, there is nothing certain in life but death and taxes. Every year, we get a letter thanking us for our contribution to nation building. While I think paying taxes is an important part to the entire fiscal system, proper tax planning allows us to not pay more taxes than what is legally necessary. In this article, I highlight 3 simple things you can do to reduce your tax obligations while achieving other objectives such as retirement planning. Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash CONTRIBUTING TO THE SUPPLEMENTARY RETIREMENT SCHEME (SRS) The Supplementary Retirement Scheme (SRS) was launched in 2001 to encourage individuals to save for their retirement, complementing their existing CPF funds. You can open an SRS account with any of the 3 local banks (i.e. DBS, OCBC or UOB). This allows you to contribute a maximum of $15,300 a year to your SRS account for Singapore Citizens and Permanent Residents. Your tax obligation for the year of assessment will be reduced by the correspond

While many tend to approach wealth management on an adhoc basis (i.e. implementing products off the shelf), I think there are merits to incorporate financial instruments at a more holistic portfolio basis. In this article, I provide an overview of what I believe are essential elements of a comprehensive wealth plan. Insurance or risk management tends to form the foundation of a wealth management plan, however, for the purpose of this article I will not include discussions on insurance and protection planning. Photo by Pietro De Grandi on Unsplash EMERGENCY FUND One key element of your wealth plan are your emergency funds. These are generally liquid assets which you can activate on short notice in the event of emergencies (e.g. unforeseen expenditure, retrenchment, etc). One trend I notice around emergency funds is that most people either have too little or too much emergency funds. I recommend around 3 to 6 months of income to be kept liquid as emergency funds. The risk of having too