Counting our chickens before they are hatched? - Jan 14, 2006

Are we being caught up in the euphoria of success that hasn't happened yet and counting our chickens before they're hatched? Not to be a party pooper and all, but I really hope not.

of myths, novels n fairy tales

Myths are examples, novels are pictures, and fairy tales beloved lies told by people who find the failed myth of life unbearable.

In myths everything is solved, in novels nothing is ever solved. In fairy tales the solution is postponed - but if the solution ever takes place, it would not be within a fairy tale. That is the lie.

(a rather depressing but perhaps necessarily true) confessions of a new snr citizen

YOU worked on a solitary project for three years, and then it's finished, and you find you've suddenly become middle-aged.
......
For younger readers who want to know what it is like to be old, here is what the good professor says: 'To those not yet old, being old means you've been. But being old also means that despite, in addition to, and in excess of your beenness, you still are...
'You still are, and one is as haunted by the still-being and its fullness as by the having-already-been... Think of old age this way: it's just an everyday fact that one's life is at stake. One cannot evade knowing what shortly awaits one.'
YOU have lived long enough to know loss, hurt, humiliation and betrayals. But you don't want to store them in your memory. It is just so much emotional clutter that can metastasise and grow toxic if you don't clear them out. You also tend to become ugly, with your unresolved rage and hatreds.
It's better to remember those times that you had (inadvertently) slighted others, or hurt them badly. You wish you could say sorry to them all. But, of course, you are being vain - you think they still remember you, when more likely than not, they don't. They have moved on with their lives.
A man needs to have family and friends, but it is in his middle age when he needs them more than ever. In the last three years when you worked on your project, which kept you homebound much of the time, you were grateful for the weekly Saturday lunches with your bunch of former schoolmates.
.......
Genes may be selfish, but human beings are social animals, they need a shared reality (quantum physicists and Buddhists will say it's a shared hallucination, but this is not the place to argue the difference). Every encounter one has with others, however brief, is part of what psychologists call 'reality maintenance'. People need people to keep sane.
The Greek word, 'idiot', originally meant someone who lived by himself. It was assumed that severed from the ties of community, such a person would be mentally incompetent.
You have lived by yourself for the past 30 years. What can you say, you have become quite the idiot. There are very few things that you can do on your own.
.......
But while you long for a companion, you fear your vulnerability. Etched into your memory is the middle-aged tailor in the French film Monsieur Hire, a solitary figure who eats a boiled egg for dinner every evening, before he goes to the window to spy on a young woman who lives in the next apartment. His story takes a tragic turn when he begins to believe that the woman will save him from his loneliness.
When middle-aged men who have been lonely for too long fall in love, they can fall hard - amour fou, (madness in love), as the French call it - and risk losing everything. Romantics will insist that this is the only kind of love worth having, but life's not literature or film.
UNLESS he's an alpha male and at the top of the food chain, the middle-aged man also has to worry about his job, as companies carry out their renewal exercises or restructuring. He may find himself sidelined, or displaced, or even turfed out.
You have friends who have been moved to the bench to make way for young turks. Because they have identified themselves so completely with their jobs, they have become fairly lost. You guard against being lost yourself, because you know that when you feel superfluous, your immune system will shut down quickly, and you will waste away or self-destruct. Your friends have their families to retreat into. You have none.
The field of psychoneuroimmunology (yes, I'm compensating here for being taken as an uneducated peasant in the coffee shops) has shown that rejection, isolation, personal devastation and self-loathing can wreck body and soul.
The cells in the body behave in a similar fashion. When a cell receives signals that it is no longer useful to the larger community, it triggers off, on its own, a series of self-destruct routines that has been preprogrammed into it. There's a term for it - apoptosis.
You don't want to die from apoptosis. You want to stay useful to the larger community. So you remain hopeful. The middle age years could prove productive and fulfilling in ways different from your 30s or 40s, you tell yourself. Your reflexes may be slower, but you have lived experience, which cannot be taught, and institutional memory (you have been in the newspaper trade for 30 years).
You want to believe in serendipity too. Perhaps some day, some woman may come and sweep you off your feet - and yet not sweep away everything at the same time.
And you want to heed the words of W. H. Auden:
'If we really want to live, we'd better start at once to try;
If we don't, it doesn't matter, but we'd better start to die.'

无题

洗尽铅华后的沉淀

6 ways to avoid paying death tax - Jan 8, 2006

A tax known as estate duty is levied on all your assets, if their total value exceeds certain limits.
Estate duty, a legacy of the British colonial administration, has been the subject of several letters in the Forum pages of The Straits Times recently.
Among the key grouses raised:
Lopsidedness: You can own up to $9 million worth of residential properties and not have estate duty levied on them.
But the exemption is less generous for other assets. If you leave behind more than $600,000 in cash, shares and other assets, the sum above and beyond $600,000 will be taxed.
Tediousness: Your beneficiaries have to furnish records of transactions and gifts made in the five years preceding your death.
Details or documents of assets, which could be located in various countries, are also required.
It could take years before the entire matter is settled with the taxman.
No matter: There are at least six ways to pare down or pay no estate duty at all.
1. Give marriage gifts to your children
WHEN your child or an immediate family member is getting married, give him a gift of cash or another of your assets.
The gift will not be liable for estate duty, says Mr Lee Chiwi, chief executive of British and Malayan Trustees. The firm advises on succession and wealth management.
If the gift is a matrimonial home, payment of stamp duty is exempted when the home is transferred, says Mr Lee.
There should be legal documentation drafted specifically to cover the marriage gifts, and an actual transfer of the gifts.
The transfer must be made within one year before or after the solemnisation of the marriage, he adds.
For other gifts not connected with a marriage, estate duty is not payable only if they were given at least five years before death.
This five-year criterion does not apply to marriage gifts.
2. Pump money back into your CPF account
THIS is probably the least known method.
Before you reach the age of 55, use your surplus cash to put back into your Central Provident Fund (CPF) account what you have taken out from it earlier for housing and education, says Mr Leong Sze Hian, vice-president of the Society of Financial Service Professionals.
Let's say that over the years you have withdrawn a total of $1 million for servicing a home mortgage, and $100,000 for your children's university education.
Assume also the interest that would have accumulated in your CPF account if you had not touched this money is $200,000.
If you have $1.3 million in cash, you can pump all of it back into your CPF account.
After 55, you can leave this money in your CPF account until you die, says Mr Leong.
Your beneficiaries save on estate duty because CPF balances are exempt from estate duty.
If this $1.3 million had been left in, say, your bank savings account, it would be subject to estate duty.
For CPF money withdrawn for investing in instruments such as stocks and unit trusts, you can choose to sell them off and move the proceeds back from your account with the CPF agent bank into your CPF account, says Mr Leong.
Alternatively, you can re-purchase with cash the stocks and unit trusts you had bought earlier with your CPF savings.
What you are then required to plough back into your CPF account is based on the CPF savings withdrawn plus accrued CPF interest or the market price of the investments, whichever is higher.
But all these actions must be done before you reach 55.
What happens then if you are already past 55?
Unfortunately, you cannot pump money back into your CPF account if it already has the Minimum Sum - the amount required by law to sustain you on a basic lifestyle in retirement.
3. Set up trusts and transfer assets there
ASSETS transferred into irrevocable trusts will not be subject to estate duty.
This is provided the trusts were created - or the assets transferred - at least five years before death.
Trusts are legal arrangements by which you can give away your assets, such as shares and property, for the benefit of other persons such as your children.
A trustee, usually an institution, will administer the trust.
If a large fee is payable to the trustee, a trust may not be viable if the assets involved are valued at only a few million dollars or less, says Mr B.J. Ooi, head of the personal financial services unit of KPMG, one of the Big Four accounting firms.
Estate duty is taxed at 5 per cent on the first $12 million of assets that are dutiable, and 10 per cent beyond that.
So for dutiable assets valued at, say, $1 million, the estate duty works out to be $50,000.
Any potential savings in estate duty through the setting up of a trust will be eroded because of set-up fees of the trust and annual trustee fees, says Mr Ooi.
Beyond estate duty savings, trusts offer other benefits such as protection of assets from creditors.
Ms Lie Chin Chin, a lawyer with Lie Kee Pong Partnership, says that if you have substantial life insurance, the proceeds of which are payable on your death, setting up a trust could be attractive for estate duty savings.
Ditto if you are single and do not have a spouse or children to nominate as beneficiaries of your life policies.
4. Put some cash into insurance policies
PARK some of your surplus money in insurance policies covering your life, and nominate your spouse or children as beneficiaries.
This will create a statutory trust which is treated as a separate estate for estate duty purposes, says Mr Simon Trevethick, a lawyer with Colin Ng & Partners.
The trust attracts its own $600,000 exemption, regardless of any other assets in the estate, he says.
Technically, he adds, it is possible to own any number of such life policies and to expect a $600,000 exemption from estate duty on the proceeds of each of them, he says.
One problem: Currently, policy holders cannot change the beneficiaries once the latter have been nominated.
Thus, if a marriage ends in divorce, the policy holder cannot strike off his spouse as the beneficiary.
To address the matter, the Monetary Authority of Singapore recently proposed changes to the relevant legislation.
In the meantime, people who are concerned about a possible divorce can simply choose to nominate their children as beneficiaries, says Mr Trevethick.
They then appoint the executors of their wills or other persons to take over as trustees in the event of their death, he says.
5. Invest in residentialreal estate
SINCE residential properties totalling $9 million are exempted from estate duty, an obvious way to reduce the duty payable is to invest in such properties.
Investments need not be confined to Singapore but can also be overseas, says Mr Trevethick.
This real-estate route has potential drawbacks, though.
The purchase of a $1 million property, for example, in Singapore attracts stamp duty of around $25,000.
This cost eats into the savings in estate duty on the property.
There are other investment factors to consider, such as the potential for capital gain or the risk of loss.
6. Loan money to a beneficiary
GIVE a cash loan to a beneficiary.
The loan amount will still be subject to estate duty but not so for the capital gains or income arising from the loan capital, says Mr Lee of British and Malayan Trustees.
The potential estate duty on the original value of the asset is locked in and will not escalate