How do you plan your monthly budget around CPF, insurance, and daily expenses without feeling stretched?

If you are still working,

1, cover your family members with medical insurance with rider, if you have dependants, buy critical illness insurance plan.

2, Regularly top up all your CPF accounts with your extra cash, aiming to hit current year top up limits.

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If you are retired and without any dependants (only you and your partner),

1, Both of you only need medical insurance coverage with rider; buy term critical illness insurance if you need; periodically review and cash out from all life insurance and investment insurance plans.

2, Regularly top up all your CPF accounts with your extra cash, aiming to hit current year limits.

3, At age 65, stop the top ups to all your CPF accounts and maximize using your CPF monthly payouts to enhance life enjoyments.

Daily spending : Remember what it it to be like your secondary school days

.Set a daily spending liimit.. Example $30/day .

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Small ticket spending :If you want a phone, instead of buying that phone tomorrow and be in credit card debt. You can wait and save over a period of months.

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Big ticket: Like planning to purchase house , renovation. Contribute regularly into an account without stopping. No matter what happen.

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You can start to looking using your bonus to do investments and not just spend them. Simple investments can be buying etfs, a bit more research and attending lessons needed for stocks picking as investment, really dangerous can be trading.

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Once you have a certain amount, hopefully high 5 digits in the a big ticket bank account, Your OA no need to top up.

And also a high 5 digit in investment, you can use the gains and dividend to top up your cpf.

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By topping up your Special Account to get tax rebate and also gain interest along the way .

That is one waym you can start to plan for retirement from being "young" by hitting basic retirement sum as a target .

As scammers get more and more "easier" to access our bank account, my stand is I let government protect my retirement. Whatever the scammer can get should not affect my ability to retire.

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One thing I do is I don't put all in into one investment instrument or depend that investment instrument for my retirement. Example, timeshare, getting overseas property , gambling, franchise, something in investment gold and some shit happened, crypto and many thousands ways of earning more money by word of mouth or you accidentally enter a circle of "people-in-the-know".

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For insurance, I listened to what the agents buy for themselves and they always say they pay upwards $8000 annually for insurance,

Actually, unless you have a person in your life that you want to leave a lot a lot of money to.

Your insurance must have 1) medishield 2) add a rider.

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Honestly, our government hospitals are always saturated. They will try to treat you as fast as possible. But sometimes, going to private hospital and faster deal with an illness is like the only choice. i.e. stroke.

Storytime: My friend's wife, in her 40s, was in the emergency room for 18 hours with a brain bleed. Finally can go into ICU after the 18 hours wait.

They did their triage and I trust the ER doctors judgements but the fear is really strong. Another thing is if you don't buy the rider, you cannot choose the doctor as affordability as possible. My friend has this brain expert he wants, but without the rider, the doctor charge near a 1 room bto (2025).

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If you have someone, you want to leave a lot of money to.

Recently, there is quite a lot of $1 million term insurance according to your age, it may cost $2k-$6k and you have to pay in your entire lifetime.

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If you don't have that someone, pay more for 3) critical illness and reduce the death payout. There are early, late critical illness. It can also cost cost $2k-$6k according to your age. Most agents try to sell the max, max payout, death, disability, critical illness. You can always talk to the agents that you want more critical illness payout and not the others. You always can go to other agents if the agent you are talking to you is NOT listening.

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My other advice is low-key, go moonlighting.

Can be daytime, you are office person. Night time, you are a gym trainer.

And keep it downlow.

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Live below your means ....

1) Track expenses (including insurance payment) and income

2) Using the tracking of expenses to plan (adjust up or down), assess if income - expenses can be saved up

3) CPF is more like long term saving - e.g. housing, medisave, or retirement. From 2 if got extra can top up to CPF - in a way saving for future - medical (MA)/house (OA)/retirement (SA)