Salary - You Are Your Best Investment

It is official now! KPO has been promoted and is no longer the smallest fry in the team. lol. The best part of the promotion is not the change in title but the salary increment that comes with it. I was given an increment of more than 20%! Always thought that I would never see such increment unless I change a company.

With this, we have unlocked a few achievements in life:
1. Beating the CPF Ordinary Wage Ceiling ($6,000) - Going forward, we get to keep more cash!
2. CZM and I can no longer BTO for HDB - Income Ceiling ($12,000) - Fortunately, we have successfully applied for one a few years back :)
3. My salary has increased by > 50% as compared to my first drawn salary
4. CZM's salary has increased by > 100% as compared to her first drawn salary

I have a spreadsheet to project our salary increment and track the actual increment which I will be sharing with the readers :) Based on our starting salary and an assumption yearly increment of 5% (I thought this is conservative but CZM thinks otherwise), it would have taken me 9 years and CZM 17 years to reach our current salary.

Ministry of Manpower (MOM) published a summary table on Singapore Median Gross Monthly Income From Work (Including Employer CPF Contributions) of Full-Time Employed Residents. For the year of 2016, it is at $4,056 including the employer CPF. I will be using the 2016 median income as an example in the spreadsheet, excluding the employer CPF portion ($3,467) because who does that! Imagine people negotiating with HR for a higher salary with X% increment based on their current salary including the previous employer CPF contribution. lol.

The cells highlighted in yellow are for you to input manually, everything else is formula linked. The spreadsheet projects your yearly salary based on an assumption of 5% increment. The "Salary Projection" projects based on your first drawn annual salary while the "Revised Projection" projects based on the latest "Actual Salary" specified by you. As you can see, it would have taken this imaginary person 6 years (31-25) to reach his current salary (27-25).

What is the purpose of doing this?

In my opinion, there will never be enough money and there will always be others that are poorer/richer than you. On the other hand, time is limited, we all have the same number of seconds, minutes and hours in a day. When you work, you are actually selling away your precious time to the company/employer. Why not sell it to the highest bidder? One has to take ownership of your own career/time because you are your best investment in life. I have friends/colleagues that complain about their increment (1/2% - losing out to inflation) and bonus and yet year on year they continue to stay in the same company. If your company is not compensating you "fairly" (performance review can be pretty subjective/dark), maybe it is time to look externally? Having said that, I do see people that are less motivated or should I say different priorities in life. Regardless, my advice is to work hard, bump your salary and invest for financial freedom so that you can stop selling your time one day...

You can get the google spreadsheet here - $$$ Salary Projection $$$

On a side note, CZM has taken full control of the Instagram account where she will be posting lots of food and their prices! I doubt she will be blogging anything in the near future. lol.

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