Owning and maintaining a car in any country especially Singapore can get very expensive. This is why pays to know how to save on your car costs.
Insurance and petrol costs may feel like fixed, but you can cut them down without sacrificing your safety and comfort. Try these 6 tips.
1. DRIVE SAFELY AND STEADILY
Being a speedster may cost you a lot on fuel and accidents. Accelerating quickly and kicking on the breaks hastily only wastes fuel. It also makes your brake pads and suspension system wear out faster. So, drive in a steady pace in top gear.
2. SEARCH THE BEST REBATE CARD FOR YOUR PETROL
With several petroleum companies in Singapore, you may wonder which company offers the cheapest petrol. Money Digest made things easier for you by comparing the credit cards that offer petrol discount in the market today. To see the full table and complete list, click here.
3. SHOP FOR CAR INSURANCE REGULARLY
It really pays to compare prices and switching your car insurance company (every year or every two years) to get the best deal. Get quotes from several companies and let the experts diagnose your car to save more. You may also want to raise your deductible to save more in case an accident or a major repair occurs.
4. GET RID OF THE SECOND CAR
If one car is enough and you are using your other car only to commute to work, consider public transportation or carpooling instead.
5. DITCH THE CAR WITH HIGHER ENGINE
To avoid accidents from happening, prevent them. Statistically cars with a higher engine are more likely to crash. More so, the bigger the engine of the car, the higher is its amount on insurance policies.
6. GET SERVICES FROM A REVIEW WORTHY GOOD MECHANIC
If you are not sure why your car is acting strangely, do not diagnose and solve the problem by yourself. Saying “it needs a new battery” might urge a shop to install one even if that is not the problem. This will only cost you more. Let the experts handle it.
Image Credits: Bob n Renee via Flickr
Now, your job is to find a good mechanic and a nice repair deal by getting estimates from three or more repair shops by gathering referrals from friends and surfing online for reviews. Try Yelp.com or Singapore car forums.
“Influencer marketing” is something that has been talked about a lot in Singapore recently, due to the feud between Xiaxue and Gushcloud (more recently, SMRT LTD (Feedback)). This is somewhat of a rising trend as more and more brands turn to influencer marketing in today’s social media obsessed world.
3 metrics frequently used to quantify how much influence a particular influencer has are: Audience Reach, Expertise, and Relationship with followers. In the context of Singapore, social influencers are frequently popular bloggers, YouTube stars, Instagrammers and the like, and they are usually popular in the millenial generation (with a growing number of mum bloggers). One of Singapore’s first blogger-celebrities, Xiaxue, has 554,000 followers on Instagram, 345,000 on Facebook, and 216,000 on Twitter, not to mention a very popular blog. Others such as Ladyironchef, known food blogger, boasts of average monthly page views of 2 million.
With today’s digital age, it is easy for consumers to whip out our smartphones and Google for product reviews before we commit to purchasing the item. Peer recommendations or word of mouth marketing play a much greater role in purchasing decisions. According to Nielsen, 92% of consumers believe recommendations from friends and family over all forms of advertising. Influencer marketing is thus very important to brands because the influencer can act as a nexus between the brand and its potential customers, acting like a loud-hailer to broadcast a certain message. Most of us would be cynical when faced with an obvious advertisement these days. But what about a review from a social influencer that we already like and trust?
Back when I was younger, I used to buy products that my favourite bloggers recommended all the time, without even searching for other reviews on the product! I liked and trusted them so much, that I simply took their word at face value. Sadly, quite a few times, I was disappointed by the product they recommended. So no matter how big a fan you are of an influencer, it would be wise not to trust blindly. Here are some reasons why:
1) Influencers are under no obligation to disclose their posts as advertising
This topic came up in the Gushcloud expose by Xiaxue, and the official response by Gushcloud was that in Singapore, bloggers are not required to disclose whether or not they are being sponsored or paid by the brand.
This, while true in Singapore, is not true in other countries such as US and UK, among others. The Federal Trade Commission in US has guidelines that require marketers to disclose advertising, and as recently as last month, settled charges against an ad agency (Deutsch LA) for encouraging employees to tweet about a client’s product without disclosing the relationship. Even within the 140-characters of a tweet, an ad must disclose in a “clear and conspicious” way any financial relationship. Similarly in the UK, in November last year, YouTube videos featuring influencers “Dan and Phil” were banned by the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK as the relationship between them and the brand Oreo was not clearly disclosed.
Is Singapore simply behind the times? Will Singapore soon change its stance with all the recent drama? The fact remains that influencers in Singapore are not required to disclose their relationship with the brand.
The post that you might be reading or watching, thinking that it is an objective and unbiased viewpoint from someone who purchased the item themselves and use it often, may in fact be a paid advertisement, in which the views reflected in the post are more likely to reflect the brand’s opinion than an honest opinion.
So why do so many bloggers chose to parrot what their sponsors say? According to Fleishman-Hillard’s 2010 Digital Influence Index, most readers do not trust sponsored blogposts to be honest, with only 24% fully trusting the article if the sample was given free, and as low as 19% fully trusting the article if the blogger was paid. With statistics like this – it’s no wonder that influencers choose not to disclose the sponsorship! It gives their readers the impression that what they’re posting is directly from their heart.
Whether to disclose or not has been widely discussed in the Gushcloud affair – and ultimately it is up to each individual influencer to decide what they are comfortable with and there are definitely some that choose not to.
2) Honesty in reviews
Even amongst the bloggers that disclose the relationship between them and the brand, it can be hard to determine how honest and unbiased their reviews are.
The success of a blog also largely depends on how much content they put out as a key factor. With the need for more and more new and interesting content, it may be hard for influencers to turn down such free sponsored products, especially when they mainly blog about reviews, food being one key example. For influencers who are either paid for the blogposts, or are being given sponsored products/services, they are definitely less likely to be impartial as compared to someone who has paid for the products with their own money. This can be in the form of demands by the brand, or even having lower expectations of the product. After all, if it is free, I think most of us would agree that we would be less fussy about it as compared to a product that we spent hundreds of dollars on.
Credit: Mothership.sg
Many brands that pay for influencer marketing also request to vet the posts beforehand. This can be seen most obviously in the Instagram post by Xiaxue in which she posted the edited caption by SkinnyMint. Now, in that case, the edit may be as simple as adding an extra line about free shipping, but it certainly puts pressure on the influencer if they know that whatever they post is going to be vetted. As said by Xiaxue herself, it is “protocol” that clients will go through the captions and photos of bloggers before approving them to be posted.
With this pressure, bloggers may feel compelled to gloss over more negative parts of the review or sponsored post in favour of emphasizing the positive parts. After all, they are being paid to promote the product.
To the credit of some bloggers, I have noticed that they include a “cons” section in their review – but usually the overall review is more favourable than not. Some bloggers also choose not to work with brands/products that they personally feel they cannot claim to be supportive of, only choosing to work with brands they genuinely endorse.
However, you should definitely exercise caution and take everything with a pinch of salt.
3) Social Influencers are not experts
It is wise to also keep in mind that many social influencers gained their influence by being funny, popular, and entertaining, rather than for their expertise.
One of the examples where this distinction is very important is when products with any health benefits are recommended. Social influencers may not have the expertise to determine if the products they are endorsing are really healthy and beneficial for you (as the brand claims they are). For instance, expensive detox cleanses of all kinds, including juices and teas, raved about by many influencers, may actually be bad for you according to actual nutritionists.
There are many times where you might benefit from reading a review from an actual expert in the field rather than a social influencer with no expertise. Another example would be in the case of gadget (phone, camera, etc), and food reviews. Some influencers receive sponsored electronics in exchange for their services, often with a clause of being locked into the phone for some time. However, there is certainly a reason why most of them are not technology bloggers – are they simply only using the phone because of the contract, or because they genuinely believe it is the best product available?
Similarly, many food bloggers have not received any culinary training. While it is certainly easy even for a layman to differentiate tasty food and bland food, it is less easy to back up a statement like “so-and-so restaurant is the best restaurant in Singapore”, if you do not have the training and experience to say so. Add this to the incentive of receiving sponsored food, and you may find that even food bloggers are not as trustworthy as it might seem.
It is important to keep in mind that the influencer can only write from their personal experience, and their posts should be taken more as opinion than as fact, especially if they are not familiar with competitor products in the way that an expert in the field would be.
4) Photo Manipulation
Sometimes, seeing is not necessarily believing. Many bloggers like to make use of before and after photos to show the effectiveness of the product especially in the cases of skincare, health and fitness. However, our eyes can easily be tricked into thinking that the product is more effective than it actually is.
There are some influencers that freely admit to Photoshopping, such as Naomi Neo, who made the news a few months ago when criticized for promoting unhealthy body image by Photoshopping herself to look slimmer. Photoshop or even just photo filters such as Instagram, can serve to make the product more visually appealing than it is in real life. One example is by making the colours more vibrant in pictures of food or clothes, making the image much more striking.
Apart from the obvious mention of digitally manipulating one’s photos, there are many non-Photoshop tricks that can be used to emphasize the difference in before and after photos. Before and after photos can be easily faked, as demonstrated by BuzzFeed in the following video.
Look out for differences in:
– lighting (unflattering vs flattering)
– posture (eg: slumped shoulders vs standing up straight)
– facial expression (unhappy vs happy)
– clothing (ill-fitting clothing vs neat and flattering clothing)
– angle (unflattering vs flattering)
– position in photo (closer to the camera vs farther away)
– any digital manipulation (eg: no filter vs filter)
and many others
All of these small differences add up to produce a much more flattering and better photo in the “after” photo, leading the reader to believe that the difference is solely because of the effectiveness of the product rather than as a result of these little tricks.
5) Your experience may not be the same as the influencer
It stands to reason that brands that employ influencer marketing do not want negative reviews from the influencers. After all, they are spending good money to increase their brand exposure. Therefore, it is possible that brands may take slightly more care in attending to the influencers as compared to what an average consumer may receive.
Perhaps some of you may have experienced the frustrating case where when your complaints to customer service are going nowhere, in desperation, you resort to posting on their social media. Unsurprisingly, once the issue is made public for everyone to see, your complaint is usually dealt with more swiftly and satisfactorily than your fruitless attempts at going through customer service. In much the same way, brands may pay more attention to ensuring the influencer receives their order without delays, and without any mistakes, or paying more attention to customer service than they would for a normal customer, as they are aware of the influence wielded by the influencer.
Due to this “VIP” treatment, your actual experience with the customer service of the brand may be very different. Influencers may also limit themselves to reviewing the product itself rather than the entire process of being a consumer.
One example of such differential treatment can be seen in the media tastings often attended by food bloggers. For media tastings, the emphasis is placed on the food, rather than the service and ambience (two things most readers would want to know when deciding whether or not to patronize a restaurant!). You can bet that at such events, in general, food bloggers and media will not be kept waiting as long as you might be during the rush lunch hour, and the chef might pay slightly more attention to the food for media tastings. You can read more about the lack of objectivity that some Singaporean food bloggers have at theselinks, written by fellow and former local food bloggers themselves.
Another case study:
Back in 2012 when Zalora first launched in Singapore, there was a wave of sponsored posts from influencers about the new shopping website. However, many customers subsequently complained about the absymal customer service that Zalora provided (examples: 1, 2, 3, 4). Whether the influencers simply were lucky enough not to have experienced the slow customer service or if they received better service, many consumers likely did not have the same fuss-free transaction that the influencers enjoyed. Or, at least, if the influencers received similar treatment, most did not openly blog about it, leading to any readers having a positive impression of the brand through the sponsored posts.
(Note: Zalora seems to have taken all the negative complaints on board, and improved in the customer service department from 3 years ago – negative reviews from 2014 onwards are significantly less.)
Conclusion:
Don’t be too quick to believe your favourite influencer when they are promoting a new product! Always do your due diligence and Google for other reviews, and exercise caution by keeping in mind that they may not be offering an unbiased opinion – and even if they are, you are free to form your own before making your purchase!
Are you a neat freak? Even if you are not, it nice to relax in a fragrant and a tidy home. Instead of buying tons of boxes and bins from the home department store, use what you have and be creative in organizing your home. To give you a head-start, here are 5 Inexpensive Ways to you can do to Organize Your Home…
1. JARS
Jars can be ideal for preserving jams, jellies, sauces, mustards and flavored vinegars. Basically, it is a storage for your food. But aside from that, you may organize your office supplies such as paper clips and pens and let the jar act as a stationary vase so you can pick up the items you need in a simpler manner.
Style the jars up by painting it with enamel, covering it up with laces, or glueing cute buttons.
2. SHOE BOX
Shoe box, usually made of paper, is a storage for shoes. It can also be used in packaging, retail stores or in your home. If you have a lot of bills, photos, tools, and sewing supplies then store it inside a shoe box.
Image Credits: alison headley via Flickr
You may divide sections of the shoe box by cutting the cover into pieces. You may also cover the shoe box with a patterned fabric to resonate the decor of your room.
3. ZIPLOC BAGS
Tired of seeing your children’s toys scattered around? Don’t forget the smaller ones such as the action figures or doll clothes that are lying on the floor. Well, ziploc bags may come in handy. Ziploc bags can be used in many ways than one because of its re-sealable zipper storage design. The see-through exterior provides easy identification of the stored contents.
Just store your child’s toys, crayons, and markers in a labeled Ziploc Bag to keep it organized. You may also store up some manuals and brochures inside.
4. TOTE BAGS
Tote bags especially those made of canvas are typically inexpensive. Take your beddings and blankets and put it inside the tote bags. You may also put your old or underused clothes inside the tote bags and donate it to those who need it most.
5. PLASTIC FOOD CONTAINERS
Plastic food containers such as Tupperware containers serve can not only serve as a durable storage for food but also for the child’s toys. For a fun tip, let your child personalize it with markers and stickers.
When considering the topic of ‘Investment’, we almost always think about Equities, Bonds or Forex first. We hear questions like “What stock is good?” or “How should I begin investing?” The growing interest in investment here in Singapore is definitely growing and we can begin to see a new generation of investors who are more daring and knowledgeable than their parents. We all have heard of stories about how other people’s parents or even our parents had their hands burnt in the past due to buying stocks or mutual funds. This has left a bad impression on many of the kids of my generation and have grown to become interested, but afraid of the risk of losing their hard-earned money as well.
Every once in awhile, we hear people talking about how this stock is going to skyrocket or that stock is going the be the next big thing. Are these truly the investments worth chasing after, or is there an even bigger and more important investment that you can and might not have begun investing in? There are many proven cases even today that those who invest in this boasts of superior returns and is still experiencing compounded growth. I hope you’re interested in what this investment is, because you should. This investment has no barriers to entry, does not cost beyond what you can afford(possibly free) and can make you incredibly rich (both in monetary and non-monetary terms). However, this investment requires a lot of time, effort, and determination.
This investment is you.
Investment in yourself is the best and the most important investment everyone should make. Cliché as it might sound, it’s one investment that many people have overlooked. The younger you begin, the more time you have to compound this investment. The rewards can come in many form, depending on what you seek from this investment – Money, Happiness, Relationships, etc. You name it, you can have it!
You may not know where to begin, as it usually is the case. So here’s a simple step-by-step guide to get you started on your investment.
Step 1: Do a self-assessment of what you love doing or want to achieve 5-10 years down the road. This would create a purpose and a direction to work towards to in your life.
Step 2: Do an inventory check of what you have and what you are missing in your pursuit towards achieving an even higher returns on your investment. Knowing what you have (Tangible and intangible) and what you don’t have allows you to work more efficiently and purposefully since you can leverage on what you have and gather what you don’t have in your free time.
Step 3: Start off with baby steps. The idea is to keep things manageable instead of taking a leap of faith. Create habits that lasts rather than simply to achieve something at the spur of the moment and allow the flame to die off after minor achievements. This could range from borrowing a book from the library once a month to taking up classes on a regular basis.
Step 4: Along the way, find a higher purpose. Sometimes we are simply not focused enough to have the fuel to keep chasing after that one dream. While it is good to be focused, it can get tiresome at times to keep at it. When you continually find a higher purpose, you will find it more enjoyable to continue the journey! This could range from teaching others what you have learnt to having the current purpose fit into an even bigger purpose! The key to it is to make slight deviations instead of totally pursuing something new. It would have been wasted effort.
I hope this article has helped you to realise that the biggest investment of your lifetime is waiting for you to invest in it. Stop looking elsewhere because it begins with you. If you have time on your side, even better! Allow time to compound the knowledge and skills that you have gathered.
Some practical tips:
If you are an investor in the stock market, you would have experienced times when you are already fully invested in the market and there seem to be nothing else you can do except to wait. It’s easy to convince yourself that it is time to take a back seat and relax. However, I urge that you keep looking out for the next investment opportunity and sharpen your skills and knowledge by reading! Books are a great source of knowledge and inspiration for trade ideas. Just don’t stop investing in yourself and you’ll see the compounded fruits of labour in years to come. Make it a point that when others have yet to begin, you’re already leaps and bounds ahead of them by the time they begin!
Searching for the perfect yet inexpensive last minute Valentine’s gift for your techie sweetie? Fear not, here are 5 Coolest Techie Gift Ideas Under S$30…
1. EC TECHNOLOGY® PORTABLE POWER BANK WITH FLASHLIGHT (2600mAh)
Available in 5 colors, this mini power bank with flashlight fits easily inside your bag or pocket. Its capacity is a one full cycle charge for your Samsung or iPhone handphones. Its weight is about 3 ounces that only requires 4-5 hours of input charging time.
We all have important files we want to protect. But, as soon as the computer crashes, all of it can be gone forever. To prevent this from happening, it is important to back-up your files with this 16 GB SanDisk flash drive. You can store a lot with this small thing.
Since airlines are now charging by the extra pound, knowing how much you are bringing on board is a serious business.
Image Credits: amazon.com
Tackle with weight of your luggage with this portable luggage scale. Its features include LCD back-light and varied unit options (i.e., grams, kilograms, ounces, and pounds). The two AAA batteries it requires are included when you purchase.
This collapsible storm lantern by Secur boasts its ability to act as a light source and as a charging source for your Smartphone incase of a storm or any light shortage emergency. There are two light settings that require different amounts of charging time. This product can also double as either a lantern or a flashlight once you collapse or fold it down.
Embrace your partner’s inner child with this cool Griffin Technology Helicopter controlled by using your IOS or Android App. Yes! You can be a pilot and control the plane’s onboard LED with just a tap of your fingertip. It features twin twin missile launchers and 6 Redeye missiles.
