Back up a bit here: what is “saving insurance”? Insurance for your savings, such as (for example) bank account deposit insurance?
If you mean some sort of savings or investment plan that an insurance company sells as a standalone product, or as a bundled feature to make a relatively simple insurance product more complex, then I agree with the other posters. You should be deeply skeptical about savings and investment products, in whatever form, that insurance companies are peddling. It is extremely rare that they are good values.
If you mean some sort of insurance that protects your savings, that’s great. In Singapore there is bank account deposit insurance. It isn’t a lot, but it protects up to S$50,000 per account holder. So many people who have more than S$50,000 in bank deposits try to split up their deposits across banks in order to keep most or all of their bank funds insured. There is also some insurance in Singapore that protects against the default of an insurance company. Again, this insurance is limited, but it’s well worth respecting. Foreign banks and financial institutions also sometimes have excellent quality, government insurance protections. My favorite example is in the U.S. state of Massachusetts. In Massachusetts there are roughly 60 savings banks that offer double insured U.S. dollar bank accounts. The first US$250,000 is U.S. federal government insured (although it’s fairly easy to raise that limit significantly with only a little bit of effort). For any deposit amounts above the FDIC limit, the state’s Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) takes over, and DIF has no limit. Hypothetically you could have $50 million sitting in one of these bank accounts, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts insures it, backed by the full faith and credit (and taxing power) of that state. Of course it’s remotely possible that that particular state government could have financial problems that could threaten DIF protections, but that’s true of any government entity. You always have to consider the credit characteristics of the guarantor.
If you’re investing in highly liquid, high volume exchanges such as the U.S. markets (New York Stock Exchange, etc.), then you have tremendous opportunity to insure your positions, effectively. That’s called “hedging.” The simplest example is what’s called a “stop loss” order. Let’s suppose you own shares of Apple’s common stock, but you absolutely will not tolerate a paper loss of more than 10% on that stock. Well, you can place a “good till cancelled” order that tells your broker to sell Apple if the price falls to $XX, where XX is your minimum. This is not necessarily a good idea as a trading strategy, but you can do it. Another, probably better option — pun intended — is to buy an option. If you trade options, then you can “win” if some unlucky event happens. That’s not free — you have to pay for the option(s) — but it’s just like insurance premiums. For example, let’s suppose that Apple stock is trading at $160. In the options market you can buy something slightly fancy called a straddle or strangle. (Straddles and strangles are very slightly different, but let’s just treat them the same here for purposes of this discussion.) It requires buying two related options, and brokers will often let you buy the two options as a single transaction. So let’s suppose you want to be paid if Apple falls below $150 and paid if Apple rises above $170. OK, you can do that. You buy the options — there’s a cost for that — and then if Apple’s stock falls a lot or rises a lot, you win. So this approach lets you bet on Apple, even without owning any shares of Apple. You can effectively protect yourself against Apple stock falling a lot or rising a lot.
The options and futures markets work pretty well (or very well) for highly liquid, transparent, high volume investments. That includes most currencies (currency hedging is very popular), the biggest volume individual company shares (Apple is a good example), major market indices (such as the S&P 500 index, so you can insure against/bet on whole stock market movements), certain commodities (such as oil and gold), and a few other vehicles. The financial world is pretty clever and offers lots of options.
In Singapore, OptionsXpress markets itself expressly for this sort of trading — hence their name — although you can also use them as a conventional broker. Interactive Brokers, another popular online broker that some investors in Singapore use, also offers full access to options and futures markets to make these bets. You have to know what you’re doing, though. You can use options and futures in a very conservative, insurance-oriented way. Or you can use them in ways that are similar to gambling at a casino. Or something in between, or some combination. They are tools, and they can be used and abused.
OK, finally, I don’t recommend the options and futures markets for most people. This is very sophisticated stuff, too sophisticated for most. Instead (or in addition, either way), I recommend at least reasonable, global portfolio diversification, and long-term investing with dollar cost averaging, as powerful techniques to reduce risk.