9 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I Moved to Singapore

There is a number every migrant carries around without meaning to. Mine is 104. That is how many months I have lived in Singapore, as of July 2026 — eight years and six months, and I still count it in months, not years.

I moved here in my twenties, the way most of us did. No manual came with the move. My parents had not lived through this particular version of building a life, so they could not warn me about most of it. I do not say that as a complaint. It is simply the position of a first generation trying to do better than the generation before it. We figure it out as we go, and only later do we see what we could have done differently.

For years I moved money and made decisions on instinct, not on any plan. I sent money home first and thought about my own future second. I did not know what to do with what I had left. It took me longer than it should have to build any real structure around my own finances.

So here are the lessons I have actually learned, the slow way, over 104 months. Some of these are financial, some are not. All of them are things I wish someone had sat me down and told me in year one.

Years back, I wrote about why I like Singapore — the reasons I chose to stay. This piece is the flip side: the things I wish I had known once I got here.

1. Build six months of emergency fund before anything else

Before investing, before anything ambitious, have at least six months of expenses sitting somewhere safe and liquid. It sounds boring. It is boring. It is also the single thing that gave me the most peace of mind, and the thing that let me take real risks later, because I was not one bad month away from panic.

2. Invest for the long term, and use what Singapore gives you

I moved to Singapore in March 2018. I did not start investing until December 2019, and even then, nobody guided me. I bought shares of companies I did not properly understand, and I traded them constantly. Looking back, I was not investing. I was trading, and calling it investing.

Singapore has no capital gains tax, and opening a brokerage account into the US market takes an afternoon, not a lawyer. I wish I had understood both facts, and used them properly, from year one instead of the end of year two. Buy shares of good businesses with a proven track record of growing, and leave them alone. Singapore is an ideal place to do this. There are not many countries with zero capital gains tax and an account with a broker like IBKR that is this easy to open. Stop checking it every week. Short-term price movements are noise. Long-term positioning is the actual game.

3. Remit less, save in SGD, keep your money working here

Family obligation is real, and I am not telling you to abandon it. I am telling you that money sent home every month without a plan is money that never compounds for you. Keep more of it here, in SGD, working in a long-term investment, unless the remittance itself is going toward something that grows — an investment back home, not just an expense or a simple financial product like a fixed deposit in a depreciating currency.

4. Look for companies that pay you in equity, not just salary

Equity is not free money. It vests over years, it can concentrate your risk in one company, and it usually rewards people who stayed a few years somewhere over people who moved every twelve months. Equity in total compensation is not common back in Sri Lanka. Very few companies there offer it. In Singapore, more companies give you this option, at the very least an ESPP you can choose to buy into. Understood properly, it is one of the more overlooked parts of compensation, and worth specifically looking for when you are choosing where to work.

5. Go beyond your Sri Lankan circle

It is natural, in a new country, to gather close to people who understand you without explanation. I did this too, and I do not regret the friendships. But go around. Talk to people from different backgrounds. Go for a run with them. Learn from them. A world that stays entirely Sri Lankan is smaller than the one you actually moved into.

6. Give a few hours a month to volunteering

Set aside one to two hours every two weeks, or about four hours a month, for volunteer work. It is one of the fastest ways to meet locals and understand the real Singapore, not the version that only exists inside an office or a condo. I found more of the country in those hours than in most of my working week.

It is also a great way to give back. It feels good to contribute to a cause you actually care about, not just to check a box. And if applying for Singapore PR is somewhere in your plans, strong volunteer hours at the time you apply can genuinely play a role in that application.

7. Use low-interest credit lines for safer investments, carefully

Some banks offer credit lines at two to two and a half percent. Used carefully, that gap between what you borrow at and what a boring, diversified investment like the S&P returns is a real opportunity. If the S&P returns ten percent and your credit line costs two and a half percent, that difference of seven and a half percent is close to free money, if you play it smart.

Timing matters too. When USD to SGD sits around 1.28, well below its usual 1.35, that is a better moment to move money into the US market. If the rate returns to 1.35 later, you get an extra layer of return on top of whatever the market itself did. This one is not for everyone. It only works if your income is stable, your emergency fund already exists, and you are honest with yourself about how much you can afford to owe.

8. Buy the land, delay the house at home

If moving back home is even a possibility for you, even if you have not decided yet, I suggest buying land early. Do not build the house until you are actually ready to move back. Building early ties up your money in something you cannot live in yet and cannot easily undo. Keep the building fund in a boring investment instead, something like the S&P for around ten percent, or Singapore T-bills if you want a lower but steadier return, and let it sit until the timing is real.

Support them whenever they need it. That is not in question. But you do not owe anyone a full view of your salary or your finances, including family. Support is not the same as total visibility, and keeping some of your numbers to yourself is not dishonesty. It is a boundary, and a healthy one.

I built this list with Sri Lankan families in Singapore in mind, because that is my own story. But swap the currency and the hometown, and I suspect most of this reads the same for anyone who has ever landed somewhere new with more hope than instructions.

We could not control what our parents were never taught. We could not control which year we happened to land here. We can control what we tell the next person who asks us for advice. It took me 104 months to sit down and write these lessons out. I would rather you have them at month 4, so you get the benefit of them for your whole time here, not just the last stretch of it.

That is it for today, guys. I hope you learned something.