SSB price is fixed. you can only redeem it at 100, there is no other price increase or whatever inversion with market interest rate.
Yes, and that's what makes them attractive for "deep" emergency reserve funds and for specific near-term savings goals such as weddings and home down payments/renovations. Also, if/when market interest rates rise you can "trade up" your lower yielding SSBs for higher yielding ones. You may need more than one month to do it since an attractive SSB can be oversubscribed, but you can eventually trade up.
Liquidity in generalized way is overrated. People need liquidity. But how much? In Singapore, liquidity can come in many ways. cash, credit cards, borrow from friends and/or relatives, load from banks etc.
I broadly agree with that. Maintaining
adequate liquidity is important. Maintaining
excessive liquidity is costly.
It's very strange how so many people seem to have few if any concerns about the massive liquidity hit involved in buying a home. But many of the same people balk at depositing $500 in CPF SA. Huh?
Do you need buy a refrigerator? do you need buy it now? These questions are more important than whether you can use CPF OA to buy it.
Here I disagree. CPF OA (before age 55 at least) has some liquidity constraints, and that's a meaningful distinction.
If your refrigerator breaks, CPF OA (before age 55) won't help. You really should have some day-to-day cash on hand to replace a major appliance if need be. That's logical and sensible.
"Buy Now, Pay Later" financing is getting more popular in Singapore and in other countries for that matter. There's some circumstantial evidence that some younger adults (in particular) are using this form of financing too often and too much. If you're using this form of financing because you cannot afford to buy the product otherwise, that's a problem in my view. If you're using this form of financing because it genuinely costs less than what you can earn on your cash, OK, fair enough.
