Why employers prefer to employ foreigners

Dear Mr. Tan,

There are a few reason that companies like foreigners than singaporean. A lot have been pointed out - just name a few here.

 

1) lower cost for compaines

2) no ns liability

3) foreigner willing to work longer hours

 

But I think the main reason is employment agnecy. The facts is that if the companies wanted to employ a staff, they would out source to the employment agency to get the employment done. But here is the different, employer do not need to pay the employment agency to hire if they get the foreigner as foreigner pays thousands of dollars to comes to singapore to work. If the employer wants to get a singaporean to work, then they have to pay for the services rendered by the agency - up to 1 month of the pay.

 

Solutions: Government should pass a law that required  all employer to pay the agency a fix amount of dollars to employment agency if they engaged their services. And all successfully employed person have to pay up to a month of their salary to the agency as well (can be pay in installment) . Thus this two combination works out to be almost the same income for the agency, which they would switch their mindset to get singaporean employed.

 

What is your view on this, Mr Tan.

William

Many people put their savings in a life insurance policy as a form of investment. Unfortunately, the policy is a bad investment, as it takes more than 10 years to break even, after paying off the commission and other expenses and finally gives a poor yield - not enough to cover inflation.

It is easy to invest your money on your own. You can open an account with a stockbroker and buy any of the following:

• Exchange traded fund, e.g. STI ETF 
• REITS (real estate trust)
• Blue chip shares, e.g. DBS, SingTel, SPH, SIA, Starhub

It cost your $3,,000 to buy 1,000 units of the ETF. You may have to save for a few months (in your bank account) before collecting enough money to buy the ETF. 

You can learn about these investments by attending the FISCA workshop on financial planning. Details can be found here.

Investment banks hire risk takers

This article explains the difference between commercial and investment banking. There was a law in USA called the Glass-Stegall Act that required them to be separated. It was a good and sensible law, which was unfortunately repealled.

Risk taking is the same as gambling. When you bet in a casino, you are taking a speculative risk. When you trade stocks or currencies, you are also gambling. It makes no difference whether you gamble in a casino or work in the trading desk of an investment bank. There should be a law against banks engaging in gambling!

Critical year policy

Many policyholders bought a "critical year policy" in the belief that they can stop paying premium after that period. They were disappointed to learn that they had to pay premium for longer than the expected period and cannot get the insurance company to honour the "promise". What has happened?

If the policyholder read the actual policy document, he would have found that the word "critical year" is not mentioned in the policy. It was actually a marketing presentation. The insurance agent took the dividends paid in the past and assumed that the same rates would be paid in the future, and also that it was possible to accumulate the dividends to earn an interest rate of 6% per annum.

The actual rates of dividends paid were lower than projected, due to the low investment yield. The interest rate credited on the dividends were also lower than the 6% projection. With both impacts, the accumulated dividends were not sufficient to stop the premium payment.

There was an example of this policy given in my book, "Get value from your life insurance policy". You can buy the book here. You can also learn about some of the other policies to avoid.

Immigrants and fake degrees

Hi Mr Tan,
The community is beginning to experience such cases of fake degrees involving the Chinese (perhaps, immigrants) which hardly occurred in the past.....
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/18-chinese-nationals-jailed-over-fake-degrees.html

Hope that the govt is able to weigh the consequences.  I am sure Singaporeans do not need such acts/behaviour to be around to influence our students/next generation or to cause any damage to our image.  Cheers.
Eugene