The last bastion of UOB’s 4-miles-per-dollar (4mpd) earning cards – that hasn’t been nerfed yet – has finally come crumbling down.

It was announced earlier in the week that, from 1 October 2025, the UOB Preferred Platinum Visa (PPV) would now have two separate 4mpd caps. While each cap is worth $600, bringing the total to $1,200, it’s still a downgrade for most people.

That’s because nearly everyone used the UOB PPV for mobile contactless payments to earn 4mpd. Remember, simply using your phone, via Apple Pay or Google Pay, to tap at a merchant with the UOB PPV would give you 4mpd.

That was great as the monthly cap was set at $1,110 per calendar month – allowing you to effectively earn 4,440 miles if you maxed out the cap.

However, now that has been split into $600 for mobile contactless and $600 for select online transactions. Many of us probably weren’t even aware that you could use the UOB PPV as an online spending card.

The fact of the matter is, you can use the UOB PPV to earn 4mpd for online spend at Department and Retail Stores, Supermarkets, Dining, and Food Delivery, and Entertainment and Ticketing.

So there are a number of online merchants you can still earn 4mpd on, including the likes of Amazon, Lazada, Shopee, Taobao, Deliveroo, FoodPanda, GrabFood, Golden Village, and SISTIC to name just a few.

My new strategy? Continue to use the UOB PPV for mobile contactless but also allocate some of that online shopping spend at Amazon, Lazada, Shopee etc. to it as well so you can save your online caps on the other “online-only” 4mpd cards.

It’s not ideal but we’ve got to make the best of a bad situation.

When you start investing, or even if you are already investing, how should we think about so-called “targets” for our savings rate? Well, it very much depends on your lifestyle and the cost of living you want in retirement.

On the practical, day-to-day level though, it also depends very much on what is possible.

If we’re in our mid-20s and just starting out in our career, hitting a savings/investing rate of 20% can be difficult, especially if there’s also mandatory CPF contributions to contend with.

That’s why it helps to set realistic goals first. Similar to one of Dave Ramsey’s “7 Baby Steps” programme to financial well-being, achieving small wins first can give us that extra impetus to meet bigger goals in future.

How do we do that? If saving or investing 20% of your monthly salary seems daunting, try setting a lower bar that is achievable, say 5% or 7.5% of your monthly salary.

If we can hit those goals, we get more pumped to actually start saving incrementally more. There’s no point going for something that is just way too much of a stretch as, at the end of the day, we still need to enjoy life in all its various stages (and ages).

China’s stock markets are at decade highs as retail investors in the world’s second-largest economy look to allocate more of their savings to local equities.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index is up around 28% so far this year while China’s main onshore stock market index – the CSI 300 – has seen gains of around 18% year-to-date.

Tim’s Take: As recently as 2022, investors were calling China’s stock markets as “uninvestable”. How times have changed.

When President Trump unveiled his “Liberation Day” tariffs on China in early April, and then hiked them subsequently to triple-digits, it seemed like China’s equity market was done and dusted.

However, it hasn’t played out anywhere close to the worst-case scenario for China as President Trump has found out that the country also has a lot of leverage of its own over the US. Added to that has been better-than-expected data for the Chinese economy.

Granted, the Chinese consumer has been subdued but there have been pockets of robust growth in specific sectors.

There’s also been recent GDP data that showed the Chinese economy expanding at 5.2% year-on-year in Q2 2025, slightly better than many expected.

China’s government announced a RMB 10 trillion stimulus last November that kicked off a mini-rally but shares haven’t scaled those highs until now.

Investors are looking for the next leg of the rally to come from retail investors on the Mainland which, ironically, make up around 80% of trading turnover in China’s onshore A-shares market.

Hong Kong’s market is much more institutional in nature, with insti investors making up the reverse – close to 80% of trading turnover.

Regardless, investors should look at it objectively. China’s stocks (HK + onshore) make up around 7% to 8% of the value of all global stocks.

As a result, any exposure outside our core portfolios (in our “satellites”) could perhaps be in Chinese individual stocks we like or are bullish on long term. And finally, as always, size your positions responsibly.