It is never too late to start savings. At least you are NOT in debt I hope!
I am not one to give advise and not sure if what I am going to say next will make it worse for you.
If I were starting off now in this current time, I might not have the discipline to go through the same thing I did. The environment and circumstances then (20+ yrs ago) and now are totally different. Back then, there was little pressure to own cars and there was much less distractions and avenues to splurge. Blue chip stocks were "cheap". We could easily pick 1 or 2 lots up at the end of every month with our savings. (By the way, the shares we bought we have not sold. Some may not agree with this mode of investment (buying to keep), but heck, who can complain if stocks were bought at mere cents are now worth $$$ and giving good dividends in all those years. Or how about the
SBS shares that we bought in 1986 that just kept giving baby (bonus) shares and splitting and morphed into both SBSTransit and ComfortDelgro shares? No one could imagine that a single lot of
SBS shares can grow into 1 lot SBSTransit shares and perhaps 20 lots of Comfort Delgro shares. (I could be wrong on the exact numbers as it happened some years ago, but believe me that was what happened.) Just multiply that by 10 lots of
SBS shares and you get a sense of the returns! Same thing happened for Sembmarine,
SIA and
SPH. Now that we are talking about shares, I am reminded to add the 18K+ dividends from the shares to my passive income. (Technically I discounted the 30K+ interest from
CPF since I could not draw them out to spend)
And yeah, it is a damned good feeling to be debt free, and have income (that you didnt have to sweat / work for) to spend every month. But habits are habits, we end up saving even more.