Subscribe Feed (RSS)Random thoughts
July 27th, 2007 by eyal | Filed under Asia, Living. |
Print This Post
I took a longer break today and went to the dentist for my regular check-up and cleaning. I picked a different dentist this time from my usual one here just to add some variety and do a bit of price / services comparison. I’ll get to that in a bit but before that, I arrived a bit early so took a walk around Raffles Place, the centre of the Central Business District of Singapore. Everywhere was busy as usual but one thing I noticed that I hadn’t before was that all the ATM machines around the place, there are over 20 of them from various different banks, had very long queues. Everyone is enjoying the current boom in the economy and property prices here, you can see it everywhere, people shopping, spending, going out and what not. This is in stark contrast to how things were here 3 to 5 years ago with deserted shopping malls and doom and gloom all over the media and people keeping very low profile. An article in the newspaper the other day wrote about a survey on fresh grads salaries, a bit of a barometer for the economy. It’s now more than 50% above the typical pay a fresh grad in a typical year gets and about double the pay of the bad years. I hope everyone can enjoy it, while it lasts ;-)
At the dentist, I was a bit alarmed to find out that I’ve been grinding my gums and roots of some back teeth with too forceful brushing. The doc (I’m assuming a dental surgeon is a doc) said: “your usual dentist must have told you this before..” and I was like: “no, they haven’t told me about this”. He then showed me with a mirror the areas I’ve grind down. Quit nasty. I’ll need to change the way I brush my teeth and get a softer brush too.
I was doing the same thing to my teeth. On a recommendation from a friend I bought and started using this electric toothbrush. It’s not cheap, but it’s the best decision I’ve made and I would never go back.
Yeah, property market is booming in Singapore. I just come to know the flat I used to rent, are rented out with 40% increase in monthly rental.
Well, in my opinion, Singapore is really a great place to stay if I am working as a high income expatriate. Too bad I was not! :-( Enjoying the security,convenience etc. Normal working class in Singapore are mostly struggling with housing loan, car loan and credit card debt.
Yup, I hope everyone is enjoying the booming economy now, well, while it lasts :)
Interesting, is this the head you’re using? I’m also using an oral-b but on batteries that takes this head.
I’ll look around to see if they have your model here. Hopefully on batteries.
In the meantime I’ll try to use less force, but I can already imagine myself waking up in the morning and completely going into auto mode and pressing again. Maybe buying a new toothbrush will be a good reminder :-)
Gav - I’ve heard similar stories of people getting their rent hiked up by this much. Singapore is becoming more and more expensive, the recent 2% GST increase to 7% but one factor that applies to basically everything. The MAS is talking about inflation of between 0.5 and 1.5% which is hilarious. Maybe it was a typo and what they really mean is per month instead of per year lol.
LOL..yeah, it must be a typo!
That’s the one I’m using, yes.
So how much does a fresh grad gets in Singapore these days?
They were saying it’s around S$3,000 to S$3,500 gross, income tax would be about 5-7% I estimate. And for locals there’s a 20% compulsory contribution to government run retirement fund + housing/investment fund + health insurance fund. I say funds because money accumulates in those “accounts” which can then be used for those specific purposes. Why? Know anyone who’s thinking of coming over here?
No, it’s just interesting to compare between countries. S$3,000 is 8,600 ILS. S$3,500 is 10,000 ILS. Fresh grads in Israel will probably get higher salaries than that in the High Tech industry, but lower in anything else. A fresh Economy graduate, for example, may get as low as 5,000 ILS, while the average salary in Israel is about 7,800 ILS. All before tax, which is much higher than in Sing.