One of the best ways to earn miles in Singapore has been to effectively “buy” them by using services that allow you to earn miles on what’s typically non-discretionary spending.

This can include things like rental/mortgage payments, tax payments, and education payments on sites such as CardUp.

Many individuals can earn up to 1.5 or 1.6 miles per dollar (mpd) on large outlays with CardUp promo codes that can bring the additional cost of purchasing miles down to around 1.7% to 1.8%.

Some of the more popular cards to use on CardUp for rental payments have been the DBS Altitude and DBS Vantage credit cards.

However, from 1 December, DBS has revealed that new rewards exclusions – coming into effect from 1 December 2025 – will mean that rental payments via CardUp will no longer earn any miles.

That’s a blow given the DBS Altitude earns 1.3mpd and the DBS Vantage gets you 1.5mpd on CardUp rental spend.

Given this, anyone who is using either the DBS Altitude or the DBS Vantage cards for rental payments on CardUp – and wants to avoid a nasty surprise – should switch to another miles-earning card before 1 December 2025.

For me, personally, the next best (after the DBS Vantage) would be the UOB PRVI Miles card, which will continue to get you 1.4mpd on all CardUp payments.

In recent weeks, there has been a renewed debate around the ever-controversial topic of the insurance industry’s investment-linked plans – otherwise known as “ILPs”.

I’ve made myself clear on ILPs many times before and I’ll say it again; stay well clear of them. That’s down to a number of reasons but the big one is misaligned incentives.

Unfortunately, the insurance industry and financial advisory industry in Singapore (and much of Asia) works on a commission-based model where sales done upfront can lead to big payouts for agents in the first or second year.

As a result, the agent who sells an ILP doesn’t have to really care how it performs in terms of its investment returns 10 years from now.

At the end of the day, though, the complexity of ILPs is why it’s a huge red flag. Nothing that’s complex in the financial services industry actually ends up performing that well. Why?

Because confusing consumers and making them think that the structure they’re buying into is some sort of “magic formula” tends to work well as a marketing strategy but tends to be pretty horrible at generating returns.

Meanwhile, a low-cost exchange-traded fund (ETF) is really straightforward. You buy it and you know what you’re getting inside plus what you’re paying. Simple and transparent.

Is it any surprise, then, that basic ETFs outperform all the high-fee “mumbo jumbo” products that are sold to everyone - from the average investor on the street all the way through to high net-worth individuals (HNWIs)?

For me, no. If you want to be successful when investing, keep your core portfolio simple, clean, and LOW COST.

Want insurance? Buy term and get properly protected. ILPs, unfortunately, neither adequately protect you nor deliver the investment returns that you are entitled to.

China’s electric vehicle (EV) champion, BYD Company, saw its Q3 2025 profit fall nearly 33% year-on-year; its largest quarterly profit fall in over four years.

A fierce price war in China’s domestic market has seen every automaker cut sales targets for 2025 as the price of new vehicles continues to drop.

Tim’s Take: Many investors thought BYD’s scale and enormous firepower would make it immune from the price wars going on in China’s autos space.

That hasn’t turned out to be the case as the latest earnings saw another painful quarter for the EV innovator, which has just registered two consecutive quarterly profit declines.

Highlighting this struggle has been the fact that BYD’s domestic market share in China dropped to 14% in September from 18% in the same month last year.

This “involution”, a term given to the vicious and excessive competition that leads to diminishing returns for all players in a sector, has been rampant in the autos space as competitors like Geely and Leapmotor aim to take market share by slashing prices.

Since hitting an all-time in May of this year, BYD shares are now down over 30% since then. One bright spot for BYD was that exports in the first nine months of 2025 actually rose 14% year-on-year to 705,000 vehicles.

With competition showing no signs of slowing at home, BYD has been focusing on building factories in overseas markets and getting its cars there, including in countries like Brazil, Indonesia, Thailand, and Turkey.

For BYD investors, the hope is that growth in overseas markets (and continued innovation on the battery side of the business) can turn the situation around for China’s EV darling.

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