"More and more expensive". This is the deepest impression most people have of the country after living in Singapore for six years.
High-quality international education resources, cutting-edge job opportunities, clean and green urban environment, and good citizenship have all become important factors for Singapore to attract the middle class.
But in recent years, prices in Singapore have risen, and people who came to Singapore with a good vision in the first place.
ONE
Singapore is too expensive
According to Julius Baer's Global Wealth & Lifestyle Report 2023.
According to the report, Singapore is the most expensive city for the upper-class lifestyle.
The Singapore government has succeeded in making it an attractive place for high-net-worth individuals to live and work, but it has also pushed up property prices, analysts at Julius Baer wrote.
Especially in this city-state with a population of slightly more than 5.5 million,
They added that basic health insurance is more than twice the global average.
Every middle-class mainland who has moved to Singapore before 2020 will miss the days when they "earned Singapore dollars and spent RMB".
In 2018, Singapore's prices were on par with Shenzhen's, coupled with relatively higher incomes and lower taxes for foreigners, living in Singapore became a very cost-effective choice for the mainland middle class.
But all of this is a thing of the past with the influx of Chinese tycoons.
The most obvious is the rent, which is a thing of the past for $2,500 a month. In the past, 7,500 Singapore dollars could rent a 200 square meter apartment near the CBD, with a large balcony and a private pool, but now the 100 square meters apartment in the same area has soared to 8,900 Singapore dollars per month.
In 2018, the tuition fee for an international kindergarten was S$1,800 per month, and now it is S$2,600 per month.
The pain of frugality is reflected in all aspects.
For example, the cost of buying a car in Singapore is 5 times that of China.
It might be intuitive to put it this way:
Singapore, or the top.
This is certainly nothing for the rich, who can work in Maybach anywhere in the world, but for the middle class, the gap in living standards is a bit blatant.
TWO
To make money or take care of children, you can only choose 1 of 2
Some people may think, I am well prepared, live a simple and fulfilling life, and have a serious job, so that I can live and work in Singapore, right?
Oh, it's not that simple.
Recently, I met a mother who has been studying with her for 6 years in Po County, and she said that the examples of those who failed to return to China around her are all this type of parents, forgetting that she came to Singapore to give her children a better education and found a job that is not salty or light.
On the one hand, he completed the downgrade of his career, and on the other hand, he couldn't control his children from playing games and couldn't study, and in the end, he lost both people and money.
This is in Singapore! Primary school starts at 8 o'clock and ends at 3 o'clock, leaving too much room for parents to play, so almost all children in Po County have to make up classes all year round, even on weekends.
Singapore Tuition Centre, S$130 for an exam
But you can't complain yet. Because choosing Singapore's education means being able to accept parents from all over the world. Government schools are with local Chinese rolls, international schools and Korean and Indian mom rolls...
The competition for further education is so fierce, if you can't devote yourself wholeheartedly, it is really better to stay in China and become an ordinary middle class.
Golden saying. There is no so-called life-work balance in the world, and the strength that can be seen by you is because of the price paid at least twice as much behind it.
And that's not all. Children want to roll, and the same needs to accompany the mother (Po County is very magical, only women are issued with accompanying visas). If you want to study in a top school in Singapore,
I asked curiously, what do you mean by that?
She said it was her own experience. 6 years ago, she was still in China, because of her work relationship, she came into contact with some overseas education resources, and felt that there were more advantages than domestic education, so she immediately decided to send her baby abroad.
I chose to choose Singapore, mainly considering that the children are still young, isn't Po County close to home?
Then I ran into a problem. At that time, the mainstream of Singapore was study tours, and few people did the study abroad business in China, because everyone gathered in the United States because they couldn't make money. So she had to ask a friend to help her find a school...
The school quickly sent out the offer, and the child arrived in Singapore without any problems. After reading for a while, my mother felt that something was wrong and she didn't have a school status, and when I inquired, I learned that the child was entering a language school.
Language schools are equivalent to training institutions in Singapore, and students are not counted at all. So she hurriedly went to Singapore in person, looking for a school to transfer to a school, and in order to enter a good middle school in Po County, she spared no expense and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to find famous teachers to do general tutoring.
Outcome... Fall into the pit again.
spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy back a "recognize reality", and what he raised was a puwa (I thought it was a scholar), there is an obvious upper limit to learning ability, no matter how much money you spend and pile up good resources, what he can absorb is still those, which is very limited.
To give an inappropriate example, this is like worrying about the child's thinness, giving him abalone and shark fin every day, and in the end, how to grow or how to grow, and the rich nutrients are not absorbed at all.
THREE
The top rich stay, and the middle class doesn't come
I'm not saying that Singapore is bad, and I'm not stepping on one.
Rather, it is to tell everyone that unless you have a deep love for Singapore and a strong obsession, there are more and easier tracks waiting for you.
There can be more countries that allow you to live only with your status, and there are more countries that can satisfy you with your living environment and consumption level even if you live in the past.
The bigger highlight of Singapore today is actually in taxes, which is more suitable for entrepreneurs, wealthy families to make asset structure adjustments, and if the ordinary middle class wants to live there, they must do a good job of budgeting and planning.
Singapore is exempt from capital gains tax, foreign income tax, dividend tax, a single tax regime, double taxation treaties with multiple jurisdictions, and a range of tax relief measures make Singapore a prime destination for investment.
The founder of Haidilao, the queen of Alipay, the co-founder of Google, etc., the influx of global billionaires has cast a layer of gold on people's dreams of Singapore.
The city-state is too small, so fundamentally people don't want a large number of ordinary middle classes, but a few top rich people.
The Chinese billionaires who moved in in 2021 bought 20 apartments at once
Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said at a summit that "we only have 3.5 million Singaporeans, but billions of people may be lining up to enter Singapore." ”
In recent years, Singapore has also been increasing the difficulty of immigration, narrowing the entrance, and clearly telling you that there are enough people, and there is another way to say that there are rich.
It was once known as a "middle-class paradise". And the real winner is probably the Chinese upstart who has come over a long time ago.
In Singapore now, everyone says that the wind is going to rise here, and countless people fantasize that they can take advantage of this wave to achieve freedom in life.
But only those who have really passed know whether they can ride this gust of wind themselves.