The Financial Coconut Podcast

For years, the credit card debate had two camps: Team Miles or Team Cashback.
Now, Trust Bank is adding a third contender, which is Stockback.
This week on Chills with TFC, Reggie sits down with Dawn from SG Budget Babe, personal finance YouTuber Demi Zhuang and Johnathan Chua from The Daily Ketchup Podcast to compare how they reward their spending.
Dawn reveals why becoming a mum pushed her from cashback to miles. Demi shares the surprisingly elaborate card strategy she uses while furnishing her new home. Johnathan knows firsthand how even a small oversight, like a forgotten S$17 Uber charge, can affect a credit score. Now he's gotten way past that and on track to shaping his financial health and freedom.
Then comes the big question: could everyday spending help more Singaporeans take their first step into investing?
With the Trust Freedom Card, you can now turn everyday spending into investing. Earn 3% Stockback on eligible purchases, and once your Stockback reaches S$10, it will be automatically invested into your chosen stock or ETF.
Would you choose cashback, miles or stocks?
Watch the full conversation on YouTube.
Sponsored by Trust Bank. This content including any mention of stocks or ETFs is for general information only and does not constitute financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any investment product. Investments involve risk and may lose value. This advertisement has not been reviewed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
3% Stockback in US Stocks and ETFs promo is valid until 31 Dec 2026. This will change to 2% Stockback on Local Eligible Spend and 0.5% Stockback on Foreign Eligible Spend from 1 Jan 2027.
T&Cs apply. Visit trustbank.sg for more info.

#TheFinancialCoconut #ChillsWithTFC #TrustBank #Stockback #CreditCardsSG #SingaporeFinance

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🎧 The Financial Coconut:
Your weekly source for empowering financial knowledge and unlocking possibilities. We explore personal finance, investing, and entrepreneurship to help you build a richer life. Join us as we explore personal finance, investing and more.

Get ready to take control of your financial future and live your best life, financially wise: https://linkin.bio/thefinancialcoconut

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⚠️ Disclaimer:
The content discussed in this episode is intended for educational purposes only and should not be considered as financial advice. The information provided is based on our understanding at the time of recording and may not reflect the current regulations or market conditions. The opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily represent those of The Financial Coconut. Please do your due diligence before making any investment or financial decisions.
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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Three companies, three very different IP playbooks. A top-10 global dairy brand patents individual probiotic strains and prints the story on packaging to justify a premium. A food-traceability startup patents its core process but keeps its actual signature method a trade secret, refreshed yearly to catch counterfeits. A local kopi-brewing startup can't patent its process at all, so recipe, hardware tweaks and a registered trademark do the heavy lifting instead.
Despite the size gap, the panel lands on the same warning: IP gets treated as a box to tick, filed and forgotten, instead of an asset that needs an active go-to-market plan. Getting granted is the easy part. Figuring out whether that patent should drive pricing, unlock licensing revenue, or protect a supply chain is the part founders skip.
For anyone weighing whether to patent, trademark, or just keep quiet about how something is made, the panel's breakdown of costs, timelines and trade-offs is a useful gut check.
Guests:
Dr Eugene Ho, Director of Research and Intellectual Property, Inner Mongolia Mengniu Dairy
Loh Jian Yuan, Chief Operating Officer, Kopi Near Me Pte Ltd
Alrik Tan, Co-Chief Executive Officer and Chief Scientific Officer, Natural Trace Private Limited
What's currently sitting in a business unprotected: is it because it's not worth protecting, or because no one's gotten around to it?

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🎧 The Financial Coconut:
Your weekly source for empowering financial knowledge and unlocking possibilities. We explore personal finance, investing, and entrepreneurship to help you build a richer life. Join us as we explore personal finance, investing and more.

Get ready to take control of your financial future and live your best life, financially wise: https://linkin.bio/thefinancialcoconut

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⚠️ Disclaimer:
The content discussed in this episode is intended for educational purposes only and should not be considered as financial advice. The information provided is based on our understanding at the time of recording and may not reflect the current regulations or market conditions. The opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily represent those of The Financial Coconut. Please do your due diligence before making any investment or financial decisions.
Learn about our events
Help us get to know you better: http://bit.ly/thefinancialcoconut-survey
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A 100% keyword match on a resume used to be the goal. Now it's often the reason it gets rejected before a human ever reads it.
Career coach Samantha Ng joins co-hosts Adrian and Faith to break down why fresh grads are sending out hundreds of applications and hearing nothing back. The diagnosis isn't a weak resume, it's a hiring system that screens through AI before anyone sees the document, filters out "too perfect" applications as machine-generated, and fills most roles through internal referrals long before they ever reach a public job portal.
Samantha, who works across local, regional, and global talent as a university career coach, walks through what's actually working right now: building a visible portfolio, going beyond internships for real-world proof of skill, using cold LinkedIn outreach the right way (ask for advice, not a job), and why energy management matters as much as strategy when the rejections start piling up.
Topics covered:
Why AI hiring screens resumes before a human does, and what a "too perfect" match now signals
The hidden hiring funnel: referrals → fairs → headhunters → portals (and why job seekers are looking in the wrong place)
Portfolio vs. internship stacking: what actually proves capability
Ghost job postings and lazy, AI-generated JDs
Cold networking that works, and why "ask for advice" beats "ask for a job"
Energy management and separating justified stress from self-inflicted comparison
What to change in the next 7 days if applications aren't converting

Practical, candid conversations on work, money, and everything in between. Like, follow, and subscribe to Wise & Shine for more.
#JobSearch #CareerAdvice #FreshGrad #ResumeTips #AIHiring #SingaporeCareers #TheFinancialCoconut

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🎧 The Financial Coconut:
Your weekly source for empowering financial knowledge and unlocking possibilities. We explore personal finance, investing, and entrepreneurship to help you build a richer life. Join us as we explore personal finance, investing and more.

Get ready to take control of your financial future and live your best life, financially wise: https://linkin.bio/thefinancialcoconut

📍 LISTEN & SUBSCRIBE

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Get daily tips, insights, and community:

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⚠️ Disclaimer:
The content discussed in this episode is intended for educational purposes only and should not be considered as financial advice. The information provided is based on our understanding at the time of recording and may not reflect the current regulations or market conditions. The opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily represent those of The Financial Coconut. Please do your due diligence before making any investment or financial decisions.
Learn about our events
Help us get to know you better: http://bit.ly/thefinancialcoconut-survey
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

His first salary in Jakarta was S$150 a month. He saved 40% of it. Eleven years on in Singapore, he sits seven or eight years out from a S$2.5 million FIRE number, with two kids and a helper.
Meet Deka, the Indonesian professional who built 630,000 subscribers in eighteen months teaching the thing his banker friends in Jakarta had never heard of: index investing. No gurus, no hot tips, no McLaren on the feed. Just a fixed split of every payday, half of every bonus into IBKR the day it lands, and a household that runs on one salary.
Deka breaks down how he outsaves his childless Singaporean friends, why he moved his largest position out of CSPX and into VWRA, and what S$2.5 million looks like once you take CPF out of it.
If you assumed FIRE in Singapore belongs to couples without kids, this is the counter-example.

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🎧 The Financial Coconut:
Your weekly source for empowering financial knowledge and unlocking possibilities. We explore personal finance, investing, and entrepreneurship to help you build a richer life. Join us as we explore personal finance, investing and more.

Get ready to take control of your financial future and live your best life, financially wise: https://linkin.bio/thefinancialcoconut

📍 LISTEN & SUBSCRIBE

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🔗 CONNECT WITH US
Get daily tips, insights, and community:

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⚠️ Disclaimer:
The content discussed in this episode is intended for educational purposes only and should not be considered as financial advice. The information provided is based on our understanding at the time of recording and may not reflect the current regulations or market conditions. The opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily represent those of The Financial Coconut. Please do your due diligence before making any investment or financial decisions.
Learn about our events
Help us get to know you better: http://bit.ly/thefinancialcoconut-survey
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Singapore's National Day Rally 2026 changed how family support works. In the past, families got a bigger payout for each additional child, more money for the second child, even more for the third. That system is gone. Every child now receives the same flat support each year, no matter their birth order.
Our guests explained why this matters more than the dollar amount itself: incentive-based payouts push people toward having more kids, while flat, universal support signals something different, that the government backs parenting itself, not a specific birth count.
The change does not fix everything.
Singles are still left out of the conversation, and policy moves faster than culture does.
Removing the incentive for "just one more child" may make the support feel more honest, but it also resets what people expect family policy to do.
Does support built on consistency actually change how Singaporeans plan families, or does the amount still matter most?

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🎧 The Financial Coconut:
Your weekly source for empowering financial knowledge and unlocking possibilities. We explore personal finance, investing, and entrepreneurship to help you build a richer life. Join us as we explore personal finance, investing and more.

Get ready to take control of your financial future and live your best life, financially wise: https://linkin.bio/thefinancialcoconut

📍 LISTEN & SUBSCRIBE

Spotify
Apple Podcast
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🔗 CONNECT WITH US
Get daily tips, insights, and community:

Instagram
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📺 MORE FROM OUR NETWORK
Discover our other shows and deep dives on YouTube

⚠️ Disclaimer:
The content discussed in this episode is intended for educational purposes only and should not be considered as financial advice. The information provided is based on our understanding at the time of recording and may not reflect the current regulations or market conditions. The opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily represent those of The Financial Coconut. Please do your due diligence before making any investment or financial decisions.
Learn about our events
Help us get to know you better: http://bit.ly/thefinancialcoconut-survey
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.