Earning Air Miles on Your Dining and Life Insurance Needs

💳 Card Hack of the Week

In Singapore, eating out at a restaurant is becoming a luxury given rising costs – never mind the 10% service charge and 9% GST. As a result, more of us are likely spending a decent amount eating our own home-cooked meals.

Regardless, we spend a decent amount at supermarkets on a weekly and monthly basis, for everything from fresh food to daily staples. That gives us ample opportunity to accumulate spend on an air miles credit card that will maximise the miles we earn.

For this, we want to go for a card that we primarily use for groceries. In this case, the best one in Singapore has got to be the UOB Lady’s/UOB Lady’s Solitaire cards.

As a refresher, remember that these cards give you the ability to earn 4 miles per dollar (mpd) on your spending on up to two bonus categories per month.

The UOB Lady’s card has a lower S$1,000 per calendar month (alongside one bonus category) limit on your 4mpd earning while the UOB Lady’s Solitaire allows S$2,000 of 4mpd on two bonus categories.

To ensure you get rewarded for all your supermarket/groceries spending, all you have to do is pick “Family” as one of your bonus categories for the card.  

For a more in-depth breakdown of what you need to know about the UOB Lady’s cards, check out my TikTok post on it here.

🎯 Personal Finance Quick Action

How much do life insurance do you actually need? This is a great question to ask amid all the aggressive selling that goes on in insurance, with many people sometimes being misled into how much life insurance is sufficient.

It’s relatively simple, really. The term “sum assured” refers to the payout your family members/spouse would receive if you were to die. Obviously, the higher your sum assured, the higher the annual premium for life insurance.

The recommended amount of life insurance, in terms of the sum assured, is around 10 times your annual salary. So, say you’re earning S$100,000 per year, then your sum assured on any life insurance policy you buy should be S$1 million.

Of course, this can be higher for someone who’s the sole breadwinner for their family and has three kids versus a 25 year-old who has no dependents. In that case, the sole breadwinner with three kids might want to get a sum assured that is 15-20 times their annual salary.

As you get older and move through significant life changes – such as having children – upping your sum assured should be a natural step.  

To learn more about how much life insurance you should actually have, check out my TikTok post here.

📈 Market Money Moves

In the Japanese Government Bond (JGB) market, super-long yields spiked to record highs earlier this week on concerns of rising inflation and the deteriorating fiscal outlook for Asia’s second-largest economy.  

The Bank of Japan is under pressure to keep raising rates after April inflation data saw inflation hit 3.5%.

Tim’s Take: For nearly anyone who has followed the JGB market in the past decade (probably not many of us!), a 30-year JGB yield of close to 3.2% would have shook people to their core. But that’s exactly where the 30-year JGB yield climbed to earlier this week.

Remember, Japan has been battling deflation for the past few decades so this new bout of resurgent inflation in the country has investors reassessing the longer end of the yield curve.

Indeed, in May 2020 – just five years ago – the 30-year JGB yield was a mere 0.33%. Yields move inversely to bond prices, so when bond prices fall, yields rise and vice versa.

But it was no coincidence that this JGB sell-off came in the same week that US Treasuries got sold off on the back of the Moody’s rating downgrade to Uncle Sam’s debt on 16 May.

Higher structural inflation globally has investors worried that bonds – particularly long duration ones – aren’t playing the portfolio “buffer” role they traditionally have. They don’t have to look too far back, with 2022 being an absolutely horrific year for both global stocks and bonds.

That’s a problem for investors as true diversification is becoming harder to find in a world of higher rates and elevated inflation. If even Japan is seeing long JGB yields start to spike, then it looks like investors’ worries over government debt and monetary policy have truly gone global.

👋 How I Can Help

Introducing Miles Consulting from Tim Talks Money

I’m excited to announce the launch of my Miles Consulting service! Through this service, you’ll get:

• ✨ Exclusive 60-minute one-on-one consultation

• 📊 Comprehensive credit card spend audit

• 📝 Personalised miles report

• 💳 Maximise sign-up bonuses

• 🚫 Avoid the pitfalls

• ✈️ Expert Singapore Airlines insights

• 💡 Optimise for couples/families