We are sorry we lost your money

it’s not fair to crit­i­cize so quickly based sim­ply on indi­vid­ual invest­ment out­comes. losses are inevitable. and I’m sure no one notices when good invest­ment earn­ings are made. I see the short­com­ing in all these being the apo­lit­i­cal nature of sin­ga­pore­ans. If we want to leave every­thing to the gov­ern­ment, then we should suck it up and accept the out­comes. Oth­er­wise, get involved… Scru­ti­nize the town coun­cil accounts… Has the invest­ments been good gen­er­ally? Is the risk man­age­able? If res­i­dents voices out to them to sim­ply put the money in FDs (or even in bis­cuit tins under the bed), I’m sure that they will more than happy to do so (in sgp lingo their back­sides will be cov­ered acced­ing to res­i­dent requests). If not they exer­cise their best judge­ments and there’s no guar­an­tees in that…

I totally dis­agree that losses are inevitable in all investments…

It depends on what the risk appetite is…

Any­way, if they claim that the returns on the sink­ing fund may not even cover infla­tion if put in FD, then may be it is bet­ter that they do not have a sink­ing fund at all…

Raise the money only as and when funds are needed — it can still be on an instal­ment plan (just charge inter­est) instead of charg­ing res­i­dents a lump sum…

A very sim­ple solu­tion to the prob­lem of hav­ing to find suit­able invest­ments for its sink­ing fund!