I am partially disabled - able to work part time but not full-time due to a severe injury. How should I best allocate my finances (insurance, investments)?

I am not from the insurance side, but speaking strictly to investments, there are some REITs and healthy dividends companies in Singapore wihch you may consider!

The key is to invest small, get to see the quarterly incomes then decide to allocate more.

I guess it is also crucial to get advice from trusted professionals!

I pray and hope for your speedy recovery!

Hi anon,

I am so sorry to hear of your situation, but reading the other answers and your responses as well, it looks like legal recourse is out of the picture.

The big picture stays the same: Build income streams, and keep liquidity as a buffer.

Income streams have two forms: Guaranteed and Variable.

On the Guaranteed side, it's really about annuities. Stable, guaranteed income streams for a period of time, or even for life. They form the bedrock of your portfolio to deal with basic living expenses. CPF Life is one of the best there is, so if you can work part time, do ensure that you get CPF contributions. As long as you contribute to CPF, you'll have a decent amount when you turn 55. Private annuities can be used as an inflation hedge or to complement.

For Variable, you have stocks, ETFs, UTs. All carry risks, without any guarantee of dividend, but their yield will be higher. The finer details can be very lengthy to talk about, so I won't elaborate here. The trade off, as always, is risk. Volatility can and will cause emotions to run high, so if you are good at managing that, you can allocate a higher proportion to Variable asset classes.

Get a good mix of both in your portfolio (start with a 50/50 split first and adjust in accordance with your preferences), keep a year worth of rainy day funds, and keep spare cash as a warchest to leverage on opportunities.

Keep the hospitalization. The ILP has to be kept too at the moment, since you are very unlikely to be able to get a policy in future as long as there is medical underwriting involved.

However, don't give up hope! Medical advances may mean that your situation could be reversed years down the road. I wish you all the best!

Sorry to hear about your situation. It's great to be at peace with what happened and move on.

I agree with the others that having a large cash buffer will be important for you given that you are working part time and with your condition. As a suggestion, you may consider dividing the rest into a couple of portfolios:

1. Instruments with guaranteed and semi guaranteed yield. Fixed income (ssb), strong s-reits and other high yielding blue chips.

2. High growth portfolio. From what I read in the comments you seem to be interested in something more than 8-10% (do correct me if I'm wrong) to grow your wealth. To achieve this you may need either guidance from a mentor or extensive research with trial and error. Not sure about your health condition and whether you can get through a weekend workshop without difficulty but I believe that finding a mentor who can align with your financial goal will help you achieve desire to grow wealth faster.

Hope this helps and all the best.

I will prefer a dividend portfolio that provides quarterly or even monthly cash returns from the stocks, REITS or indices return.

Go for local dividend stocks and local REITS for the long term. They provide a better stable returns than other instruments in the long run. I would prefer US stocks myself, but I think you will be more comfortable with dividend stocks in SGD.