Balance Sheet and Asset Allocation of a Singaporean Family

Before we go into the asset allocation , let’s take a look at the balance sheet of the Singaporean family. BTW I made all the no.s up and it is not based on any official statistics and no scientific/accounting methodology has been used to come up with the no.s. So please take them with a bucket of salt ok?

Anyways here it is:

Balance sheet of a typical Singaporean family
Assets
Cash & CPF $25,000
Stocks $25,000
Car $45,000
Other assets $5,000
HDB $400,000

Liabilities
Mortgage $350,000
Car Loan $50,000

Shareholders Equity $100,000

Thanks to the real estate recovery in the last 1 year, the typical household now sees some positive equity (as compared to past 10yrs of negative equity for a lot of Singaporean households)

So if we take a look at just the asset part we come to realize that a typical asset allocation/portfolio mix of a Singaporean family is about as interesting as watching a big snake poo-poo. i.e. not interesting at all lah! Anyway, in percentage terms, this would be

5% cash
5% stocks
10% in totally worthless depreciable assets like 1 x Automobile, 2 x Plasma TV and 32,000 credit card points exchangeable for 1 x 60GB white silly looking music player which is also worthless. (btw all these are under Other assets).
and
80% real estate (HDB flat)

If we apply what we have learnt about Modern Portfolio Theory, diversification and Markowitz, the Singaporean household is really quite undiversified and the fortunes of the household is basically determine by how much this little red dot is worth in the eyes of the world.

Fortunately our Government (with a capital G one, don’t pray pray) realizes this (maybe 10 yrs ago) and has planned to make the little red dot the favourite spot for foreigners to come and work and/or invest in our real estate. In concrete terms, 2 important policies made it all successful.
1) The 2 x Integrated Resort (IR) projects
2) The decision to grow our population from 4mn to 6mn pple
And as they say, the rest is history.

So what does it mean for the Singaporean family that is trying to push its asset allocation closer to the efficient frontier? Well if you believe in the almighty of our beloved Government, you can buy more real estate, hopefully somewhere overlooking Marina Bay and Sentosa. If your bet is right, forget about efficient frontier and the rest of the crap, you can start writing your own blog about how you made it and how this blog sucks.

If you believe in Markowitz and diversification, then it’s better to think of how to diversify the portfolio from real estate. Alas, this is not easy bcos RE will probably make up a huge chunk of your asset portfolio and you can only either save a lot more money to invest in stocks or other asset classes, or sell your property and downgrade. I admit both are not very realistic lah. But it’s important to keep this in mind though. And when you have the means to diversify, you should do it.