Your Salary in Singapore

 Is Your Net Worth Above US$255,488?

The average net worth in Singapore is US$255,488 per adult, according to the just-released and inaugural Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report 2010. In Singapore dollar terms, this is S$335k per adult.

If you do not know how to calculate your net worth (also known simply as “wealth” in the report), see the Salary.sg article on Calculating Net Worth and Benchmarking It.

Interestingly, our median net worth is a mere US$30k per adult (or S$39k per adult). This means that people above the median have so much wealth that it skews the average to almost ten times the median.

Most other countries do not have such bad skewing, including US (whose average is 5x its median), India (3.8x), France (3.8x), Indonesia (3.6x), Taiwan (3.1x), UK (2.9x), China (2.7x), Australia (2.6x), Canada (2.4x) and Japan (2x).

To illustrate the skewing, imagine a group of five friends with $10, $20, $30, $40 and $50 each in their pockets. The current average is $30. The median is exactly the same, at $30. Now, give an additional $1,100 to the richest guy. The median remains at $30 but the average is skewed to $250!

This is what’s happening in Singapore.

Other information nuggets from the report: Singapore has about 1 million people in the world’s top 10% whose net worth is each more than US$72k (S$94k), and 110,000 people in the world’s top 1% whose net worth is more than US$588k (S$771k).

What is your net worth?