I want to write something for Singaporeans in their 30s and 40s who are holding up two generations at the same time.
Nobody writes for you either, though the reason is different.
You're not overlooked because you have no money. You're overlooked because you have no time, and because your situation doesn't fit anything neatly. Too solvent for sympathy. Too stretched for the advice written for people your age.
"Max out your investing in your 30s" assumes your salary has one job.
Yours has three. The mortgage. The children. And your parents.
I'm in this decade myself. But I spend a lot of my time working with people who are 55 to 65 — which means I get to see the far end of decisions being made right now, by people my age, who won't find out for twenty years whether they were right.
Here is what that view shows. Seven things.
One. You are not behind. You are loaded differently.
You compare yourself to someone your age with more, and conclude you did something wrong.
You have no idea what they're carrying. Some have parents who are fully provided for. Some had help with the downpayment. Some have no siblings, no obligations, and a partner earning the same as them.
A balance means nothing without the load standing next to it. Comparing net worth without comparing obligations isn't analysis. It's just a way to feel bad on a Sunday night.
Measure against your own trajectory. It's the only comparison that carries any information.
Two. Ask your parents the question.
Most of us have never asked: how much do you actually have?
We ask about their health. We ask whether they've eaten. We don't ask about money, because it feels rude, or ungrateful, or like counting something we have no business counting.
So we guess. And most guesses I come across are too optimistic.
Here is why it's the highest-leverage thing available to you this decade. If you're 40, the biggest variable in your own retirement is usually not your salary or your savings rate. It's whether your parents have enough. If they don't, that shortfall doesn't stay with them — it arrives at your door in your 50s, which is the exact decade you were quietly counting on to catch up.
Most families discover this at the worst possible moment, when a fall or a diagnosis forces the conversation.
It's far easier ten years early, when nothing is wrong and nobody is frightened. And it doesn't have to open with a number. It can open with: "Father, do you know what your CPF LIFE payout will be?" — a question about a scheme, not about their savings.
Many parents don't know the answer. That isn't a failing. The rules changed more than once while they were busy raising us.
Three. Decide the number once. Stop deciding it every month.
What breaks people is not the amount they give their parents. It's that the amount was never actually decided.
An undecided obligation gets renegotiated emotionally, every month, for twenty years. It can't be budgeted, it can't be planned around, and it quietly expands to fill whatever guilt is available that month.
A decided number — this much, reviewed once a year — is something you can build a life around. It is also, strangely, easier to give generously, because you stop bracing every time the phone rings.
Put it into your plan as a line item, with a start date and an honest guess at an end date. Not so you can resent it. So you can see it.
You cannot plan around something you've decided doesn't count.
Four. In this decade, you are the asset.
Everything rests on your income continuing. The mortgage, the children, the money going home — every one of them is a claim on your ability to keep working.
Which means the largest risk in your financial life right now is not that your investments disappoint. It's that you can't work for two years.
Most people your age spend far more attention on where their money is invested than on whether the engine producing it is protected. The engine is you. And unlike a portfolio, it does not recover on its own.
I'm not telling you what to buy. I'm telling you which risk is larger — because most people have the two the wrong way round.
Five. At 40, a raise beats a return.
If you have a modest base and thirty working years in front of you, your biggest lever is not yield. It's income, and time.
Two percent more on a small balance is a rounding error. A step change in what you earn, compounded over the same thirty years, is not. Nor is starting five years sooner.
Yet most of the energy goes into optimising the small lever, because it feels like control — while the large one, which is skills and positioning and being willing to ask for more, feels risky and personal.
Attend to the big lever first. There will be plenty of time to be clever about returns once there's more to be clever with.
Six. Be careful about buying your children a childhood you’ll be funding from your 70s.
The enrichment, the tuition, the branded everything. Each decision defensible on its own. Together, sometimes, a slow transfer of cost from today into your old age.
And the person who eventually carries that isn't only you. It's the same child — at 45, sandwiched exactly as you are now, except that this time you are the parent in the equation.
The most useful thing you can hand a child is not a fully funded childhood. It's parents who never become a financial emergency.
Seven. And this one is gentler. This decade is the heaviest, and it is temporary.
Six hard things. Here's the last.
You will not solve all of this in your 40s, and you were never supposed to.
The sandwich thins. Children become independent. Parents' needs resolve, one way or another. This is very likely the most financially compressed stretch of your entire life — and you are standing in the middle of it, and the middle is always the part that feels permanent.
Don't burn yourself out trying to win it in three years. Don't hollow out your marriage or your health to buy a number. The number was never the point.
Steady beats urgent. Direction matters more than pace. And you have longer than the worry is telling you.
One last thing.
If you take a single action from this letter, make it the second one. Call your parents this month and ask about their CPF.
Not because it's comfortable. Because it is the only item on this list that gets harder every year you postpone it — and because the answer changes your plan as much as it changes theirs.
And if you do it, tell me how it went. I'd like to know.
