The UOB KrisFlyer Card Gets Nerfed and How To Think About Allocation

💳 Card & Miles Hack of the Week

If you fly Singapore Airlines, even once or twice per year, it’s probably worth getting the UOB KrisFlyer credit card. That’s because it gives you a pretty reasonable 3 miles per dollar (mpd) of spend on all Singapore Airlines Group transactions.

Crucially, that rate is uncapped meaning you could spend S$1,000 or $10,000 on flights and you’d still earn 3mpd.

That means you don’t have to waste your spending cap on other (better) miles earning credit cards, like the online-focused DBS Woman’s World Mastercard – which many people might use for booking flights as it gives you 4mpd.

The UOB KrisFlyer also offers an attractive “accelerated miles” rate of 3mpd for dining, online shopping, and food delivery as long as you spend a minimum amount on Singapore Airlines Group transactions in your membership year. Again, this 3mpd earn rate is uncapped.

That comes in the form of a 1.8mpd bonus on top of the 1.2mpd earn rate for non-Singapore Airlines Group transactions. However, that is now getting nerfed! Instead of 3mpd for those transactions, from 1 June 2025, cardholders will only receive 2.4mpd – an effective 20% cut.

For a detailed breakdown of what exactly is getting nerfed with the UOB KrisFlyer credit card, check out my TikTok post on it here.

🎯 Personal Finance Quick Action

Thinking about how to invest in this (highly) uncertain economic environment. As I’ve said before, a lot of what we’re doing – if we have a clear long-term plan – probably shouldn’t be touched.

But it’s also worth remembering how we might invest, if we started over completely today in 2025. While many of us might like to pick individual stocks, there’s also a very strong case to have a significant amount of our wealth in broad-based exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

The beauty of ETFs is that you can get exposure to various asset classes with them and, in today’s environment, asset allocation is likely to become even more critical to how we view our long-term returns.

With that in mind, how would you invest $1,000 today? It’s worth bearing in mind that equities (stocks) should really make up the bulk of our portfolio if we have at investment horizon of at least 20 years.

In Singapore, one of the biggest issues I’ve seen is that many individuals are just too conservative with their allocation to meaningfully grow their wealth over time or even maintain spending power given the corrosive long-term impact of inflation.

So, keeping in mind that this is NOT personalised financial advice, I’ve built a starter portfolio for anyone investing $1,000 in Singapore in 2025 – using just four ETFs: One for global stocks, one for Singapore stocks, one for gold, and one for Bitcoin.

For a detailed breakdown of my asset allocation approach with $1,000, check out my TikTok post on it here.

📈 Market Money Moves

DBS Group Holdings (SGX: D05), Singapore’s biggest bank, reported Q1 2025 results that beat expectations, despite the fact that net profit fell slightly to S$2.9 billion from S$2.95 billion in the year-ago period.

Tim’s Take: No surprises from DBS as it reported – it was another solid quarter from the bank even if the outlook is markedly more cloudy than it was at the beginning of 2025.

The slight net profit decline (on a year-on-year basis) was mainly attributable to the implementation of a global minimum tax of 15%. In fact, DBS actually saw net profit increase 10% on a quarter-on-quarter basis from Q4 2024.

Its net interest margin (NIM) dipped slightly to 2.12% in Q1 2025 from the 2.15% in Q4 2024 while net interest income (NII) also fell sequentially. Yes, yes, lower rates will start to have an impact but what about the other areas of the business?

Well, markets trading income and fee income from wealth management did well, particularly the latter as that grew a whopping 40% quarter-on-quarter to a record S$724 million for the period.

DBS CEO Tan Su Shan gave an upbeat assessment on loan demand for the rest of H1 2025, with full-year loan growth projected to be around 5% to 6%.

Investors should remember that banks are cyclical stocks so – if the global economy goes into recession – then Singapore banks won’t be spared. However, they have incredibly resilient capital buffer ratios and they’re paying out those sweet dividends.

Indeed, DBS announced a total dividend of S$0.75 per share for Q1 2025 (S$0.60 ordinary and a capital return of S$0.15). Based on its annualised S$3 per share dividend, DBS shares are currently yielding close to 7%. In that context, it’s easy to understand why bank stocks are still so loved by Singaporeans.  

👋 How I Can Help

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