How to earn more money in Singapore

I remember the first time I went to my aunt and asked her how to save money.

She taught me to cut the nearly empty face wash tube in half with my scissors, so that I could dig out the remaining face wash to use.

She would argue.

There’s still a lot left!

I followed her advice for years. Until I realised that this was leaving me feeling even poorer than before.

And I was still earning the same amount of money.

Earning $3690 per month

Then in April 2024, I stumbled onto the salary range published by Jobstreet. I stared at my screen, wondering what I was doing, stuck in my office.

As someone who had been working in the social services as a social worker for $3690 per month,

The first thing to say though, is that you shouldn’t be comparing.

Where the money is going

But the second and more important thing to note though, is that in a hyper-inflationary environment, it’s vital that you understand where the money is going in the job industry. Because you may end up grinding longer and harder, and find yourself still desperate, and dry.

As a student social worker, I once encountered another social service professional who was sharing about how broke she felt. She had been listening to a client share about their monetary problems.

But in her mind, she thought,

wait till you hear about mine.

You need to know where the money is going, so that you are able to retain some degree of dignity for yourself.

Sure, you may kid yourself and say ‘Money is not everything’, but money is a lot when you have to make decisions about whether you should eat at the restaurant with your friend.

There is beauty in being humble and simple, and not having many wants.

But after serving in social services for 5 years, I came to realise that you can do good, whilst still earning good money. You simply can use the money you earn to help someone else.

The 80/20 of being wealthier is to be tracked on outputs, and not inputs

For years, I wrote about how you could get $3 of cashback from spending $500 with the UOB Debit Card. Or how you could save another $1 by going to Sheng Siong, rather than NTUC to shop for groceries.

But then I read Naval Ravikant, the angel investor behind the likes of Airbnb, Uber, and Yammer.

For example, a good software engineer, just by writing the right little piece of code and creating the right little application, can literally create half a billion dollars’ worth of value for a company.

But ten engineers working ten times as hard, just because they choose the wrong model, the wrong product, wrote it the wrong way, or put in the wrong viral loop, have basically wasted their time.

Inputs don’t match outputs, especially for leveraged workers.

We might often find ourselves trying to save cents, and losing dollars. We might even be silently angry, wondering why we are not rich when we seem to be putting in so much effort.

I confess. I’m like this. Growing up in an elite school where every classmate’s family had a car (and mine didn’t), I was always curious about how other families made enough money to afford such luxuries.

I slowly began to see that outputs, did not match inputs, especially in today’s modern world. How hard you work doesn’t matter as much as what you’re working on. That’s how these people became rich. They decided to systematically grow at their skills, and not just their time spent on work.

That is true today. You would see your TikTok engineer easily earning $8000 a month, whereas your social worker who’s working 9 to 9, and possibly putting in hours on the weekend too, still stuck on a paltry $3700.

Growing the depth of your skills, so that you’ve such a unique combination of skills that’s hard to replicate and find, will make it much easier for you to earn more money.

For example, over the past 2.5 years out of a job, I’ve slowly found my income growing past the $3690 I earned in a fulltime job because of my continued desire to deepen my understanding of different skills such as facilitation, design, and organisation development.

To best develop these skills, don’t just take a course. Practise them.

These experiences also brought me to see the myths of trying to be wealthier.

Myth 1: Saving money, but not time

Yes, saving on those Starbucks, bubble tea and restaurant meals can help. But not if you don’t use the extra to do something with it. The worst thing is wasting time, to save money. As a broke university student I used to cycle from supermarket to supermarket, trying to find the cheapest deals.

Until one day, someone alerted me to the fact that the 1 hour I spent weekly, could probably be spent earning some extra cash.

Saving money, but spending more time on that pursuit might not be the best way in the long run.

Myth 2: Earning more money takes time

Naval Ravikant, the angel investor behind the likes of Uber, Airbnb, once said,

Seek wealth, not money or status.

Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.

Often, we think earning more needs to come through more time spent at work, or on side-hustles.

You may have come to a point where you’re doing a full time job, giving tuition on the side, and barely having time for your friends.

You’re exhausted. And there’s a revulsion when you read this article and think,

Gosh.

Yet another person asking me to earn more money.

Over the past few years, I’ve seen the wisdom of socking away the excess earnings I had when I previously had a full-time job.

When I had a scholarship, I was given an allowance of $2400 even though all I needed was about $1000 per month.

Whilst I sucked at investing, I simply did what my grandpa used to teach me when I was younger. He would look at the Teletext, and then buy the counters that would drop below a target price on TV.

That first exposure taught me that one dollar stored away today, could yield $1.50 in future cash flows. We often look at an investment’s return on interest, without considering that the more valuable part is its ability to grow the cashflows of the business.

Myth 3: Earning more money is tiring

You know the feeling of being smashed? Where you’re sat on the bus, looking out of the window, knowing that you have a thousand things to do, but not being able to do them?

Welcome to the idea of being smashed.

Recently, I was on the grind for more and more money from side-hustles. I had been facilitating focus groups. Every week.

And every gig would earn me $300.

But now, I simply could not continue. I felt low on energy.

When I went to work, daily, I would write in my diary,

Tired.

It was affecting not just my present productivity, but my future productivity too.

The transformational moment came when I started to see the dividends from my stock investments. Whilst it only yielded an average of $250 per month, it meant that I could now earn, without putting in any time.

So how do you earn more? Find a dividend paying stock in Singapore.

Let’s now go to the practical things you can do.

What we think the 80/20 of earning more is:

1. Spending where you get value for money
2. Earning more
3. Earning as you sleep

But since we’re on the topic of earning more, let’s talk about that.

Your gigs are worth the while

As much as your company is going to tell you not to do side hustles, and not to ‘moonlight’, we all know that can’t be possible with Singapore’s employers being particularly kiam (or miserly).

Here’s where I’ve tried, heard, and think you might want to do too.

In Singapore, the gigs mainly revolve around companies looking to defray the cost of hiring full timers. Even if you don’t have the skills now, you can always build them.

Since being a Year 2 university student in 2018, I’ve gigged for about 6 hours now. There are some priorities to consider.

Prioritise your main job before gigging

Make sure that your main job is not affected.

Why?

1. You wouldn’t want to lose your main job on account of your side hustles (unless you really hate your main job).
   
   2. That’s why you need to ensure that your energies are well spent, and not excessively spent on gigs such as being a gym class instructor, which might leave you tired and drained.

Start from your complementary skills

When I stopped working in a fulltime job in October 2021, I was at a loss. I went back to what I knew from university. Writing articles for money.

At that time, I was fortunate that earlier in July, I had earned my first ever cheque from writing articles, with Singapore Kindness Movement kindly posting me an honorarium for writing.

If you’re looking for a way to earn extra money today, why not start from your base of skills?

Look at where there are opportunities to gain money from that.

Then start asking for money

A simple question can be:

will this be a paid engagement?

Asking this question can raise the awareness of the person asking you to think of how to make your time worth the while.

Whilst it’s helpful to do things free at the beginning of your side-hustling journey, at some point, that work needs to convert into money.

One thing I’ve learnt is to at least charge some money, and not make it free.

It makes people appreciate your work a lot more.

When I started doing digital marketing for others, I had no experience running Google Ads.

I asked the client how much they could afford and they came up with a price of $150 per month. If you see other agencies, they would easily charge $800 per month just to run your ads.

But I still took the money, even though I would spend a lot more time than initially expected.

What I don’t recommend

I once had a friend who was working 7 days a week as a group fitness instructor. She would be running the HIIT (high intensity interval workouts) 7 days a week.

Slowly she began to see herself getting too tired to even get out of bed. It’s vital that you moderate how you’re earning money, so that you can earn money for a longer time.

Start small, start now

It’s a long list here. But start first.

Think later.

And along the way, keep some time to enjoy the money you’ve made.