Retirement Planning

There is a growing awareness among Singaporean for the need to plan for their own retirement. Gone are the days where people intend to rely on their children for their living expenses after they retire. In this era, most of us are caught in between supporting our parents and children at the same time. Thus this generation is conveniently termed as " Sandwich Generation". Even the government is trying to help us in this aspect by coming up with various schemes like the Minimum Sum Scheme, Supplementary Retirement etc..

However there are many road blocks to saving for retirement. Below are some of the common ones:

• Spending too much and saving too little
• Unexpected expenses
• Inadequate insurance
• Divorce
• Using retirement Fund prematurely
  

There are ways to overcome the roadblocks to retirement saving. First and foremost, be aware of your spending ratio. If you have difficultly in saving up, you can set a 90/10 spending ratio for a start. 90% of your income to maintain your current living standard and 10%(*exclude cpf contribution) directed towards long-term financial objective . Slowly decrease your expenses and increase on the saving portion to eventually a 80/20 ratio.

Second, before planning for a retirement it is important to have an emergency fund set aside. This fund is to help you to meet any urgent needs. This emergency fund size is recommended to be around 3-6 month of your current income.

Third, you should ensure you are adequately covered in your insurance needs. In the event of any illness, it will protect your wealth not being exhausted from the medical bill and other expense. Your effort in building your golden years nest will not be wasted. Take note that insurance needs does not only apply to personal life insurance, it should also include general insurance to cover your property and assets. Take a person who is currently a retiree for exampler, if a fire breaks out in his house, the cost of re-instating the house will immediately deplete a substantial portion of his retirement fund.

In my next post I will elaborate more on the various sources and instruments available to achieve the difficult but do-able objective of retiring right.

The Secret

Sometime ago, i met a manager from Manulife while i was on the bus home. We had a good chat and she recommended me a book title. Back then I was loaded with things on my mind and i conveniently forgotten about it. 2 weeks later my buddy send me a link and ask me to watch a video clip. What an coincidence, it's about the same book that i fogotten. The book, "The Secret", by Rhonda Byrne.

The full title of the book is "The Secret Law of Life". I feel the book is a combination of motivation, NLP, Spiritual and religion . Times we wonder howcome others manage to be so lucky in life and whatever they encounter seem to good to be true. This is the part where the law of attraction comes in. Whatever happen to you is a result of your thought . Thoughts Become Reality!! You might be thinking of what not to happen. For example,you might be thinking " please don't come and annoy me i'm in a foul mood". The fact is our brain focus on the keyword ANNOY ME. It radiate out the freqeuncy to attract what you are thinking about. Then people keeps coming to annoy you. People keep focusing on what they do not want and instead of what they WANT. What they don't want keep happening around them. If you want anti-war, go for the pro-peace .

I went for a conference on April in Taiwan, one of the speaker talks about NLP( Neurolinguitic Programming). I find the some points mentioned very similar to what is stated in the book, especially about the model of thinking pattern. After the conference, i started to change my thinking pattern. I find it quite useful for me. Now i tend to choose my thoughts carefully, whenever there is negative thought i will replace with positive one. So i feel good all the times.

For more detail please check out the link (http://www.thesecret.tv/). Originally it came out as a video but the response was overwhelming.So they publish the book as well. Click on the pics for the video. Hopes these things work for you...