Jobless Graduates Should Consider SAF

About half of fresh graduates polled here are unemployed. If you are a male fresh graduate affected by the recession, you should consider joining the Singapore Armed Forces.

As reported in ST today, a lieutenant-colonel retiring at age 45 (the current retirement age) will get about $700,000 in gratuity. Such lump sum payments make it attractive for SAF joiners to serve till retirement.

If you have a good honours degree, your starting gross salary is $3,630 as an Officer Cadet Trainee in a combat vocation. If you prefer engineering or logistics vocations, you get $3,390. Without honours, you get about 15-20% less. Still not bad.

If you sign on as a 3-year contract officer, you get a "sign-on bounty" of $10,000 and a end-of-service gratuity of about $6,000. There's also an additional "combatant bonus" of $6,000.

SAF joiners can also participate in the SAVER military scheme, which is "designed for a long term commitment."

Though the details of the SAVER scheme are not available, we now know that the financial rewards of this scheme can be very attractive indeed.

For more info, refer to army recruitment website.

http://www.salary.sg/2009/jobless-gr...-consider-saf/

A narrowly-focused view; only the financial returns of a military career has been taken into consideration

The armed forces offer a great career. Just look at their TV advertisements. Surely, if they can spend so much money producing such attractive TV commercials they must mean what they say.

if that's the case, why is my army major fren always on the lookout for lobangs? seems he can't wait to get out of S.A.F.O.

$700k is a myth. It assumes a particularly high rate of return AND doesnt apply to every LTC..a more realistic figure is about $300k.

whats $300k gonna do for you when one retires at 45/50??

:P

Life in the army is very stressed out and the organisation often suck your weekends away. This is the price to pay for the salary.

sign your life away.......

How much an officer gets in his SAVER when he retires and how much he draws as remuneration when he is in service depends on who he is in the SAF.

Two officers of the same rank can draw pay in disparity of more than 100%.

There is a structured and organised tier system within the organisation for this separation.

SAVER is simply a portion of an officer's monthly salary deposited into a special account, further topped up by the government by another percentage point. It functions on the same principles as CPF, so that the officer can withdraw at the end of his tenure at retirement, on top of his regular CPF. So basically, the amount of SAVER of an officer is entirely dependent on how much his monthly salary was during his service.

Which means the ST report that states a LTC can expect $700k in his SAVER is a flawed estimation and flawed reporting. Since two LTCs can draw a pay difference of over 100%.

being in army do make sure u are prepared for lots of OT , coz every little thing that happens in saf will convene inquiry and every little thing is an emergency and your bosses will call u back 24/7, not even counting the weekends burnt coz of countless exhibitions or marathons or visits by vips/ mps. lots of office politics (worse than in many other organisations). and, oh, occasionally get sent to iraq even if you have young kid.

if all that's ok, yup, the pay's not bad. =)