How can one achieve $100k, where his take-home salary is $2,598 per month after CPF deduction?

Let’s work out the sums here:
Salary ~2600
2600 - 700 (parents) - 650 (insurance) - 850 (expenses) - 500 (SIA) = - 100

How are you gonna save if you have -100 after investing in SIA?
Are you banking on hopes that your STI ETF (3k) and SIA investments ($500 x 12 months x 5 years) to turn into 100k in 5 years? 33k into 100k? I don’t think so either and that is taking into consideration both are making profits in 3 folds.

Or are you taking CPF into account as part of 100k?
2600 being your salary,
I’m assuming that 20% has gone into CPF and 17% from your employer, that would be around 1.2k.
72k for CPF in 5 years and 30k from your SIA and 3k from STI ETF, yes, it’s possible to hit 100k. Once again, that’s assuming that your investments remains or goes above your principal amounts.

Hope that helps.

There seems to be a lot of focus on reaching 100k. But the journey can be different for everyone, and I am not sure if you listed everything.

• Have you included any tuition fee loans or outstanding credit card/other debt?

• Based on what you listed above, your insurance is abt 25% of the take-home pay. While I don't dare to claim myself as an expert, do you know what you are buying, and can you sustain it, given how much you spend on insurance is as much as your CPF contributions?

• If I tally up what you listed above in terms of monthly spend, it's more than your take-home pay: 700 parents + 800 own expenses + 500 SIA mthly invest + 650 insurance. Be careful, I think you should always work with a balanced cash flow that is sustainable.

• Last question - do you have a specific reason for investing in SIA? I don't like to give investment advice that is specific to stocks, but SIA has seldom turned up in my stock pick screening. If you are able to convince yourself why it is a good investment, ok... If not... Would doing the DCA on STI be better until you know what you are buying?

If I do this from an alternative method, 100k minus your current savings of 21k = 80k or so.
Divide that by 5 years, we would need 16k per year. If I count only 500 of monthly dca, that's 6k a year.
I think in your mind, you are including some portion of the insurance, though its a bit iffy.

I think if you are confident of increasing your monthly salary to 5k or so over the next three years, while not increasing your expenses by more than 10%, you could do it.

I do think it's not too healthy to keep focusing on a 100k amount. If I would say it bluntly, you guys are forcing yourselves into some sort of wealth comparison competition, and it's not healthy. It's not good either because everyone has diff circumstances and some may not be so fortunate, and some could do more than 100k.

Focus on balancing the budget, pay off credit cards/line of credit / other loans, invest well, look for ways to trim unnecessary expenses, and I think you would be well on the path. Don't worry too much abt a 100k number.

There are certain things that I think you are doing well, eg a healthy allowance to parents, I hope you bought the right insurance etc, so overall not too bad. But if you cut some of these down to aim/focusing on hitting the 100k, I think that's not too right... But that's my opinion.