When I was studying in London and the States, I always thought that working and earning an income in those countries beat being in Singapore and earning the low salaries that starting graduates were given. In fact, I was paid so much in my gross salary during my internship at a bank in London that on market exchange rate basis, I only got back to that same level of monthly salary in the 5th year of my scholarship bond. Even if my salary was stagnant for 6 years at the bank and I was paid like an intern, I would have earned more.
But would I have been able to earn more in terms of disposable income? How about disposable income minus the critical expenditures like rent and the premium for food that I didn’t have to pay in Singapore? How about the high level of taxes in those countries? Now, people may say that after doing the Math, they realised that as a percentage of the total income, the cost works out to be roughly the same, and so you save the same percentage of your income.
Yet that is not exactly the same. The same percentage of a higher income at market exchange rates implies that you do have a higher amount of absolute savings. And this is where it starts to matter because capital markets are largely global and the pricing is consistent across the world. This means that if you’re able to amass a higher absolute amount of savings at market exchange, you have greater purchasing power for public securities and other financial products. The advantage of being able to enjoy lower costs of living does not outstrip the disadvantage of a lower absolute savings.