Figure out your expenses first.
Write down what are recurring and what are one-time expenses.
Then, decide what expenses you want to keep.
Next, decide on an amount you want to save every month.
The trick to saving money is to save before you spend.
This means the moment the salary comes, you must move the amount you want to save out of your spending wallet/account.
I recommend you make it as troublesome to take money out as you can.
For eg. Get another bank account or convert it to illiquid assets. Basically, if you ever lose discipline and want to touch the money, minimally, it should require you to take a few steps before you can get the money be it having to do OTP, login or pull out the debit card from a difficult place so you have time to think if you really should spend it.
Next, spend only 10% of your income on insurance. Just get a term plan and a hospitalisation plan. A term plan has no cash value but it will be much much cheaper than an endowment or whole life plan for the same coverage. Also, once you are in your 70s or 80s, you will have kids to support you so you don't need as much coverage so whole life plans become less useful past those ages. Get a financial adviser that can sell multiple companies' products and not just one.
Lastly, learn to invest. Find out about technical and fundamental analysis and at least learn one of them. For a start, go for mutual funds and REITs which are basically funds that pool money to buy a portfolio managed by a fund manager. You can do this via ETFs, Unit Trust or REITs. Try to pick those with global exposure because it is harder for the entire world to suck economically than a region at any one point so if you are diversifying over the globe, it is safer than investing into just 1 region, industry or company. If you are risk aversed, at least go for bonds or Singapore Savings Bonds instead of letting your money get eroded by inflation.
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