The most consistent thing in the personal finance space is that journalists will continue to project how much Singaporeans would need to retire. The numbers fluctuate, but more importantly, you should analyse how the numbers are derived to see whether you agree with the methodology. This article examines the latest attempt to project your baseline retirement funds needed to live out your remaining years in Singapore.
The chart that’s making the rounds
If you’ve been on LinkedIn or Instagram this week, you’ve probably seen it: a world map from Visual Capitalist titled “Mapped: How Much Americans Need To Retire Comfortably Around The World,” with Singapore lit up as the single most expensive country on the planet to retire in: a cool US$1.1 million (roughly S$1.4 million at current exchange rates).
It’s a great chart. It’s also, if you actually read the fine print, answering a completely different question than the one everyone assumes it’s answering and, consequently, Singaporeans are the group most likely to be misled by it.
Before you spiral into thinking your retirement number just went up by seven figures, let’s take the chart apart.
What the study is actually measuring
The underlying data comes from NetCredit, a US consumer lending company, using cost-of-living inputs from Numbeo. Strip away the infographic polish and the methodology is quite simple:
- Retirement window: a hypothetical retiree stops working at age 64 and lives to 78.4 years, the average American retirement age and US life expectancy. That’s 14 years and 8.4 months, or 176.4 months, of retirement.
- Cost base: multiply that window by a monthly cost-of-living figure pulled from Numbeo for each country, built around an assumed lifestyle of inexpensive restaurant meals, weekly nights out, a couple of overseas holidays a year, moderate transport and no smoking.
- Buffer: add a flat 20% “comfort” margin.
- Currency: everything expressed in US dollars.
- Exclusions: taxes and healthcare costs are explicitly left out.
That’s it. There’s no adjustment for local retirement age, local life expectancy, local currency purchasing power, or, critically, local retirement institutions. The 176.4-month runway is the same whether you’re retiring in Lagos, Lausanne, or on Lavender Street. Only the monthly cost figure changes from country to country.
In other words: this isn’t a model of “how much does it cost a Singaporean to retire in Singapore.” It’s a model of “how much would an American, retiring at an American retirement age, need to fund an American-style consumption pattern, if he paid Singapore’s prices for it.” Those are very different questions, and the gap between them is where the scary number comes from.
Four reasons the Singapore figure is inflated
1. Numbeo’s Singapore price data is an expat’s price list, not a resident’s.
Numbeo is crowdsourced, and its Singapore contributors skew heavily toward foreigners and higher-income residents, who price private rentals in the city centre, imported groceries, and Western dining. That’s a real market in Singapore, but it is not the market most citizens retire into. It systematically overstates the cost base for the median Singaporean household.
2. It assumes you’re renting, when 9 in 10 Singaporeans own their home.
Housing is typically the largest line item in any retirement budget, and it’s the one the NetCredit model gets most wrong in Singapore. Roughly 77% of resident households live in HDB flats, and Singapore’s homeownership rate is above 91%. By age 65, most homeowners have long since cleared their HDB mortgage, often using CPF Ordinary Account savings rather than cash, so the largest “expense” in the model (renting an apartment in the city centre) simply doesn’t apply to the typical retiree. A model built around monthly rent will produce a wildly different number from one built around a paid-up flat.
3. The 14-year-8-month runway is imported wholesale from the US, and it doesn’t even match Singapore’s own numbers.
This is the tell that the “life expectancy” figure was never localised. Singapore’s own life expectancy at age 65 is now 21.2 years (Department of Statistics, 2024). That’s several years longer than the 14.7-year US-derived runway baked into every country’s calculation, Singapore included. If you’re going to build a “how long does the money need to last” model, at a minimum, the number of years should change when you change countries. It doesn’t. The 176.4 months is a constant, not a variable.
4. It pretends CPF doesn’t exist.
This is the big one. The entire premise of the NetCredit/Visual Capitalist model is that a retiree self-funds every dollar of spending from a lump sum they’ve saved and now have to draw down over a fixed period, the classic “4% rule”- style problem. That’s a reasonable way to think about retirement in a country with no compulsory pension system. It is not how retirement works in Singapore.
By the time a Singaporean turns 55, decades of compulsory CPF contributions from both the employee and the employer have already been building up a Retirement Account. Set aside the Full Retirement Sum, S$220,400 for those turning 55 in 2026, and CPF LIFE pays out an estimated S$1,780 a month for as long as you live, with no risk of outliving the money, because longevity risk is pooled across everyone in the scheme. Medisave and MediShield Life separately cover a large share of healthcare costs, which is precisely the expense category NetCredit excludes from its US-style number anyway. None of this appears anywhere in the “how much you need saved” figure that gets turned into a world map.
What a more realistic number looks like
We don’t have to guess. The Department of Statistics’ Household Expenditure Survey 2023 found that households made up solely of non-employed persons aged 65 and above spent an average of S$2,349 a month. Even if you gross that up generously for a genuinely comfortable (not bare-bones) lifestyle, run it over the 21.2-year post-65 life expectancy, and layer on a margin of safety, you land nowhere near S$1.4 million (US$1.1 million). That’s before counting CPF LIFE payouts, a paid-up HDB flat, or Medisave as part of the picture, which the NetCredit model doesn’t do either.
This isn’t the first time a headline number has gotten away from us
If this feels familiar, it should. Around this time last year, an HSBC “Quality of Life” survey made similar headlines, claiming that Singaporeans need S$1.79 million to retire comfortably. That number wasn’t wrong, exactly. But it was a self-reported figure from HSBC’s affluent, private-banking client base describing their own aspirational retirement lifestyle, not a study of what an average or even median Singaporean actually needs. The methodology quietly determined the answer before the survey even started: ask wealthy people what they think they need, then report it as “what Singaporeans need.”
Visual Capitalist’s map makes the mirror-image mistake: instead of surveying an unrepresentative group of people, it applies an unrepresentative American template to Singapore’s prices. Different method, same result: a headline figure that’s technically sourced but practically meaningless for the person reading it over breakfast and wondering if they’re behind on retirement.
The takeaway
A retirement number is only as good as the assumptions baked into it: retirement age, life expectancy, spending pattern, and crucially, what institutional support (if any) is already doing some of the work for you. Strip those assumptions out of the Visual Capitalist map and what’s left isn’t “how much Singaporeans need to retire,” it’s “how much it would cost an American to import an American retirement into Singapore, in US dollars, while ignoring CPF, HDB and Medisave entirely.”
That’s an interesting number. It’s just not your number. Before any retirement statistic changes how you feel about your own progress, it’s worth asking the same three questions every time: whose spending pattern is this, whose life expectancy is this, and whose safety net, if any, has already been assumed away?
Knowing the real number is only half the plan. The other half is what pays for it. Join Chris Ng on Zoom live this Saturday to find out how he built a dividend income portfolio that funds his own retirement and supports his family. [Register here]
