Increasing my Returns on Education

A follow up of my post about my investment in education here.

This is not really like a special article, but just about changing to a job that pays more.

This is more of an article about myself on my reasons why I changed my job.

My school fees totaled to about 40k.

Do note that for simplicity, all earnings here here unless stated is post CPF deductions without income tax.

At my first post degree job at a local hospital institution in Singapore, at that time, I saved 1.4k a month, with a take home salary 2.4k/mth (on average) as I was eager to recover the cost of my education.

This calculates to about 36k p.a. gross income, about 24k p.a. net income, representing a Return on Investment of about 60% (the pros of salaried employees ;) ).

But at the same time,  I felt that I needed more money as I was gonna take on more financial commitments such as my family expenditures and my bro studies. So I looked to increase the Return on Investment (ROI) of my education.

So Why I changed to shift work? (to make it worse, that job is not very related to what I have been doing so far)

Working at my first job as a diploma holder, I asked many folks doing their PhD about where they wanted to go after completing their PhD (many were not renewed and had to find many other opportunities after their PhDs, guess a research student doing a work of a postdoc is cheaper I guess). They told me that they would stick around in research to have fun before going into the industry, where fun time is over.

So I jumped on an opportunity when an ex-colleague of mine introduced me to pharmaceutical manufacturing positions. So I left, going from research as a degree holder, straight to the industry, instead of going a big loop, wasting time and money.

Also, as I wasn't very good at studies so a Masters and PhD had a higher chance failure rate, paired with a competitive market with very little positions (you need more techs to do work than PhDs to design assays/projects), considering at these:

• I used NTU research fees with subsidy (doubt I would be able to afford private/overseas schools)
• I do not factor in opportunity costs here as well nor job stability.
• Salary package is assumed to be 3 months bonus+AWS, staff welfare is about the same.
• Masters starting salary was about 2.8k/mth, increased in only about $400/mth with 14.5k school fees, adding on BSc school fees, it totals to 54.5k. So we get about 42k gross p.a., estimated 28k net p.a. resulting in about 51% ROI. :(
• PhD starting salary was about 3.6k/mth, increased in only about $800/mth with 29k school fees, adding on BSc+MSc school fees, it totals to 83.5k. So we get about 54k gross p.a., estimated 36k net p.a. resulting in about 43% ROI. :((

So the ROI actually decreased significantly if I studied further.

As I had to worked on shift, this increased my monthly salary by about 33%, resulting in a take home pay of 3.42k/mth (basic is lower at 2.4k/mth). The bonus+AWS was estimated to be 2.5 months in total. (There is OT pay, unlike my prior job as well as for Masters/PhD, but for simplicity I will exclude that in the calculations)

This resulted in saving 2.1k a month (about 50% increase), so we get about 47k gross p.a., estimated 31k net p.a., resulting in about 77.5% ROI!

What about time?

The complaint for many people about shift is the lack of time/life, though I'm not really a supporter of work life balance but rather I look for most pay per time spent.

Well, for me, my shift job only occupies 15 days a month on average excluding OT, although I work the same hours as office folks, I find that I have more free time for my off days!

This is a double bonus, as I am working on other side ideas to generate more streams of income. ;)

Well, that's my rant for this week.

Not sure it is really helpful but rather it is something I wanna write it down and look back one day. This blog is a journey of me to financial freedom afterall. :)


*Special Note* Well, if you wanna mix more numbers in, by pure gross annual salary, my current workplace has an estimated increment of 3.5%, while my prior workplace has an estimated increment of 5% (excluding promotions but my current workplace has vertical progression while my prior one has almost zero vertical progression), it takes about 10 years for my prior job to catch up in terms of gross annual salary, with a difference of a whooping 70k difference! And we haven't talked about employer CPF contributions and more staff welfare (for my present job)! That's a big sum too. ^^"