So I've been dating my partner for a while now and felt that we want to bring our relationship to the next level of getting married. The first thing that generally comes to mind in Singapore context would be to get a Built-To-Order Housing Development Board flat (BTO HDB), which is basically affordable public housing heavily subsidized by the government.
To those who are wondering why would Singaporeans think about getting a house first before even getting married, the main reason is because you get a new house that's way cheaper than buying resale flat from the market.
The second reason is because of the time it takes for the flat to be built. It generally takes between 3 to 5 years from the time you pay for the option till your key collection date. That's a long time to slowly prepare for a wedding so people tend to get it settled before planning the other wedding stuff.
Thirdly, it makes more sense to apply for a BTO when both your combined income are low. This is because of the grants that the government is giving for lower income earners when they are buying a house for the first time. One thing to note is that as long as you are eligible for the grant when you select your flat, even though your income may be higher at the moment when the grant is disbursed, which is during key collection, the grant that you are eligible for will still be given to you. So securing a flat early potentially means receiving higher grant for young couples who just entered the workforce.
You can check out the latest grants available at HDB website so I'm not going to go into the details. For me and my wife, because we both only started working when we first applied for the flat (one of us must have worked for at least year to apply), our combined income was less than $5k a month, which entitled us to a combined grant of $30,000 back in 2013 (This is before they revised the amount, the grants today is way more but I guess we would have missed the boat even if we waited since our income would have risen out of the range after the revision). One thing to note is that the grant is yours to keep. Even after selling your house, the money goes back to your CPF account. So I consider it as a $30k discount for my first house purchase.
Each application for a HDB flat costs $10 to deter those people who applied for fun. Even then, the first time when we applied, the queue number was in the thousands' range for a 200+ unit project, which meant that it was almost 5 times oversubscribed. This is a normal phenomenon and many people who have applied for many projects before getting a decent queue number.
Luckily for us, we managed to get a good queue number on our second try that is well within the number of units available, so we were more or less guaranteed a unit if we are not too picky.
Since this post is not about getting a house, I shall not go into the details about getting a house. But I may post a separate post on this in detail later. Nonetheless, being a true average Singaporean means that the first step of getting engaged is to first get your BTO flat.
After we applied for the BTO, we kind of feel that we were sort of engaged. Naturally, the next big item would be the proposal ring.
Not speaking for anybody, but some girls prefer the ring to be a surprise and hopefully the guy knows the girl well enough to know her preferences. Otherwise, the disappointment upon seeing the ring while the guy is already down on one knees can be a big motivator for rejection.
Thankfully for me, my wife knows not to trust in my taste so she was actually involved in the ring selection process. Our ring selection process was one where we patronised all the major retailers like Lee Hwa, SK Jewellery, Soo Kee (which was when I realised Soo Kee is not the same as SK!), Love & Co. to shop for designs and to compare prices.
In the beginning, it was a like a wild search where we would just drop in to browse for the design that she liked. Honestly, they all look the same to me and they all serve to same purpose, so the common denominator that is the easiest for me to compare is the price. If only it were that simple.
Not only do we have to consider the material of the ring casing, we have to consider about the diamond, which in my opinion, is being overly complicated to justify the mark up in price. The 4 C's (Carat, Color, Cutting, Clarity), which are absolutely invisible to the naked eye, and definitely not distinguishable when you put 2 stones of the same size beside one another. Each slight change in one of the C's can mean a few hundred dollars of difference. The scroungy side of me is think how many plates of chicken rice can I eat.
Ultimately, after many uncomfortable sittings at the jewelry shop where the sales person will try to entice you with "Today only" or "Last day" offers, we managed to narrow down to a particular design, without buying anything.
Now the thing that I want to share in particular is not the brand that we eventually purchased from. It is the exact opposite: we did not buy from any of the retailers. We rationalised that the retail shops have to upkeep the store rent, branding cost, salesperson commission and all other cost that goes into that tiny piece of stone and metal, so the price is definitely not worth paying for.
Hence, we went to check out this jewelry shop inside an industrial park. The name of this shop is called Poh Kim Jewellery and the boss is Tay Kim Seng. Unfortunately, since we got our ring back in 2014, I have since lost his name card all I have is the receipt below. In any case, don't just take my word for it, Google him up and I'm sure you can kind many raving reviews about his level of service and especially the price he offers.
The potential savings that he helped us to save on the rings (Engagement + Wedding Bands) goes right up to the thousands, and I'm talking abotu $3k to $4k worth of savings for the 3 rings that we bought. Not only is he very helpful in teaching us what to look out for, his sincerity in keeping as us long term customer emanated through the trust that he has placed in us by allowing us to transfer payment to his account rather than insisting on cash payment. Hopefully no jerks ever take advantage of him, and if they do, may those jerks die a thousand deaths and never find happiness.
After the ring was settled, next is to plan for a romantic proposal. By then, my wife had already dropped several obvious hints that she wants a surprise proposal by showing me videos of other people's proposal.
The thing that I needed for a surprise is an alibi and some accomplice to hoodwink her into believing she is going for an entirely unrelated event.
One good thing about our relationship is that I don't really share much details about my National Service life and definitely not much about my Reservice. So I used that to my advantage, making her think that one of my ICT's will only end on Sunday evening, when in fact we were already released on Friday.
I used the whole of Saturday to make the final preparations like getting fresh flowers to make a 99 rose bouquet. Yes, I DIY-ed my proposal bouquet with the help of my mother who had experience handling flowers. We bought 50 white and 50 red roses and some other mini flowers plus leaves from Far East Flora @ Thomson for only $70. I didn't even bother to check out what's the market rate for 99 rose bouquet so don't ask me how much money did I saved on the flowers.
The proposal was supposed to take place at one of the pavilion on Keppel island before all friends and family head over to a restaurant called Privé Keppel for lunch. In the end, things did not go according to plan because I thought I could set up decoration at a pavilion nearby. Turns out, we can't do that as Keppel island is privately owned and in addition even if we could get away with it, the weather on the actual day was raining!
Fortunately, Bryan Yap, an Events Executive at that time and my liaison with the restaurant was extremely helpful in allowing me to use the restaurant space instead and making sure the proposal went on smoothly. So having the restaurant space was the life saving turn of event. The buffet cost $2.3k for 30 pax, which was considered very reasonable because I got to use the whole restaurant space for the whole morning and a little into the afternoon before they have to prepare for dinner.
The reason why I chose that restaurant is because my alibis are the yachts there. My accomplice, who is my Wife's younger brother was to lie to my wife that his friend got a yacht but had to cancel plans so passed the reservation to my wife's brother. So the whole family made plans to go for the 'yacht trip' together in the morning. My wife was naturally hoping that I could go too, but because my reservist "ends on Sunday evening", I could not go.
On the actual proposal day, my friends and I went early to set up the decorations. We used lots of balloons that I bought from TaoBao, and a pirate ship that I made myself with materials bought from ArtFriend. I've also made a treasure chest to put the proposal ring. Everything was DIY and so I saved quite a sum of money compared to engaging someone else to do it. It also made it more memorable knowing that I did all that preparation work myself. And to add a final touch to the theme, I dressed as Jack Sparrow. The costume was rented from a costume warehouse in Toa Payoh for $140.
So when my wife and her family arrived at the restaurant, although she denied it afterwards, she was shocked to see me and everybody else we knew in the restaurant waiting for her. After I gave a 15min speech, no prize for guessing, she said yes to my sacred question. The rest is history.
I would liked to end off by saying "... and so they got married and lived happily ever after...", but things are never that simple in real life and this marks only the beginning of the many other preparations we need to make for our wedding.
To be continued...
