Where to start in savings, budgeting and investment?

As per what financial books said, it's better to have 6 months of your expenses as rainy day savings. As such I believe the investment plan should be put on hold until you achieve this saving amount.

All these are imo.

Savings account:
CIMB fast saver. 1% p.a. but need maintain min $1000; though no fall below fee. Dump all your cash in here.

Expense account:
Any account. But since you just finish your studies, I'm assuming you're still 20-23.
Have either OCBC FRANK account(no fall below fee till you're 26) or DBS multi currency autosave account(no fall below fee till you're 29).
Only transfer your cash to your expense account when you need to spend it. To me, this form let's you know how much you are spending based on transferring basis.

Investment:
Robo advisors: Smartly has pretty low investment amount needed so you can consider.
RSP: Nikko am STI ETF with DBS. No need to create a brokerage account as long as you have a existing account with DBS, Internet banking can just do it.
P2P loans: If you're a more hungry investor and willing to take risk you can try this out. For me I will go for invoice financing loans since to me it's less risky as backed by an invoice. Shorter tenure loans, able to see interest repayment as short as a month.

Hope it helps! :)

Hi there.

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You don't really need to be invested in unit trusts with DBS to start on POSB Invest Savers. Believe the latter can be started via an atm instruction at any POSB atm.

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Firstly, you may wish to look into getting your insurance protection and health plans in place first before looking at investing. Good to have an hospital plan in place so that it can relieve potentially heavy hospital bills. Look into low cost term protection plans as well.

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As some of the others have already mentioned, for the amout you are looking of investing into, you may consider robo advisory platforms for a global investment perspective (perhaps StashAway if you don't have a large capital base to start off with), or STI ETF via POSB if you prefer a local flavour. Please do your own due diligence before embarking on any investment. And perhaps the best investment you can make is on educating yourself via books. Or feel free to ask anyone in the community here if you have any questions.

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For medium to long term investing, if you are keen, look into the investment programmes widely available and choose one that fits your personality. Not to mention you need to find the right mentor that is approachable, even after graduating from the programme. You'll need to pay quite a bit, but I see it as a shortcut to retiring earlier.

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All the best in your journey. Cheers :)

Just save everything, don’t even bother to invest or travel. Set aside some money once you have sufficient savings/captial to do other things. But for now just save