Most financial planning is about one question: will I have enough?

At some point, if things go well, a second question turns up. What happens to the money I don’t spend?

Maybe you got there on your own, thinking about your children and what you’d like to leave them. Or maybe a banker or an adviser has shown you a “legacy plan”, and you want to know whether it’s any good before you sign anything.

Either way, this guide is for you. It goes through the main types of legacy insurance plans in Singapore in one place.

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When a parent has a stroke or receives a dementia diagnosis, long-term care stops being an abstract worry. Within weeks, you are comparing nursing homes, pricing home nursing, and working out who takes time off work.

It does not only affect the elderly. At one major insurer, most long-term care claimants are under 50.

Families in Singapore spend an average of $2,952 a month on long-term care, yet the national CareShield Life scheme pays $689 a month in 2026. Below, SmartWealth consolidates the latest long-term care statistics in Singapore, from the true cost of care to the subsidies that soften it. All figures are in Singapore dollars.

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You probably have some life insurance. Perhaps a policy your parents bought, a plan you signed up for in your 20s, or the group cover that came with your job.

So does almost every working adult in Singapore. And yet, the average working adult here is still around $170,000 short on death cover and more than $260,000 short on critical illness cover. Scale that across the country and the shortfall comes to $373 billion on death protection and $579 billion on critical illness, going by the latest national study.

Being underinsured is the normal state of affairs here, not the exception. Here’s the full picture in numbers.

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Have you noticed more of your friends and colleagues talking about topping up their SRS account each December?

The numbers back up that impression. The Supplementary Retirement Scheme (SRS) has quietly become one of the fastest-growing parts of retirement saving in Singapore, and the official data behind it is rarely laid out in full.

The Ministry of Finance publishes cumulative SRS statistics every year, but only as a raw PDF table. In this article, we turn 25 years of that data into something you can actually read, and add our own analysis of what it means for your retirement planning.

Note: All figures are in Singapore dollars (SGD). This page is updated regularly as new data is released.

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How does your CPF balance compare with others your age?

It’s a question Singaporeans keep asking on forums like Reddit and Seedly, usually because the official data is scattered across raw tables that are hard to make sense of. Yet the numbers matter. CPF holds $677 billion across 4.3 million members, and with Singaporeans now living to around 84 on average, those savings have to last longer than ever.

We’ve pulled the latest releases from the CPF Board and data.gov.sg into one page: average balances by age, what retirees actually receive from CPF LIFE, and how many people hit their retirement sums. This page is updated regularly as new data is released.

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How much do you actually need in CPF by 55? The answer is one of three numbers. Two of them, the Basic and Full Retirement Sums, are set by the year you were born and stay fixed for life. The third, the Enhanced Retirement Sum, is a ceiling that rises every January for everyone.

This page keeps the current CPF retirement sums in one place: the figures for 2026, the announced 2027 figures, every cohort’s locked-in sums, and how the numbers have grown since 2003. We update it each year when new sums are announced.

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Somewhere at home, there’s a drawer or folder holding insurance policies bought over the past 10 or 15 years. Some came from different advisers, one or two from an ex-classmate who joined the industry. If you had to say, right now, how much you’re covered for if you fell seriously ill, could you?

An insurance policy summary is the fix: a single table listing every policy you own, what each one pays and for which event, what it costs, and until when. One page, and your total cover finally becomes visible at a glance.

You don’t need to build the table yourself. FinSnap, our free financial snapshot template, includes a ready-made Insurance Policy Summary sheet alongside the rest of your financial picture. It’s a Google Sheet: make your own copy (or download it as an Excel file), and it’s yours to keep.

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Your home is probably the biggest financial decision you’ll ever make. Yet most of us plan the purchase in obsessive detail, then never plan the ownership.

We compare towns, stalk showflats, and calculate stamp duty to the dollar. What we rarely ask is how the flat or condo fits into everything else: our retirement, our insurance, our CPF, and what happens to the property when we’re gone.

That’s what this guide is for. When more than half your wealth sits in a single asset, that asset deserves a plan.

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You’ve spent years working towards owning your own home, whether that’s a resale flat in Tampines or a condo in Bishan. But have you thought about what happens to it after you’re gone?

Most Singaporeans haven’t, and our estate planning statistics for Singapore show just how common that gap is. It’s an uncomfortable topic, so it gets pushed to “another day”. The trouble is, without a plan, your family could be left untangling unfamiliar paperwork at the worst possible time, forced into decisions they were never prepared for.

This guide walks you through what actually happens to your HDB flat or private property when you die, and more importantly, what you can do now to make sure it goes exactly where you want it to.

Passing on your home is also the final stage of property planning, which covers how your property fits into your finances from purchase all the way through to this point.

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Modern medicine can keep a body going long after recovery has stopped being possible.

That’s a comfort in many cases, and a quiet fear in others: being kept alive by machines when the dying has already begun, with no way left to say “enough”.

An Advance Medical Directive is how you settle that question in advance, while you’re well and clear-headed. It’s one of the most misunderstood documents in Singapore, so here’s exactly what it does, what it doesn’t, and how to make one.

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