No trust fund. No family safety net. Why I chose fatherhood in Singapore.

Cost informed the decision. I refused to let it make the decision entirely.

Family · Stakes: High · Confidence: High

My judgment: Yes, raising children in Singapore is expensive. My wife and I could have tried to build our family elsewhere. I would still choose here.

I did not choose fatherhood because I had eliminated the risks.

I chose it because a risk-free life was not necessarily the life I wanted.

This is not an argument that everyone should have children.

Choosing to remain child-free is legitimate. Some people do not want children. Some want them but decide that the financial, physical or emotional costs are too high. Those can all be responsible decisions and I respect all of them.

This is for people who do want children, but increasingly feel economically disqualified from having them.

I understand that feeling.

I am sharing the considerations behind our decision not to persuade anyone, but to offer a more structured way of thinking through the fear. Parenthood will never come with complete certainty. But uncertainty becomes less paralysing when we can separate genuine financial constraints from assumptions, noise and worst-case scenarios.

Perhaps that can give some confidence to those who want children, but are afraid they cannot afford to begin.

Money had a vote in almost every major decision I made.

I simply refused to give it the only vote.

Money was always in the room

I grew up in a below-average Singaporean family where money was a constant topic.

There was family-business debt. Emotional turbulence at home. Financial uncertainty that could enter a room even when nobody spoke about it.

I learnt early that money was not only about comfort.

It was security. Control. Options. Sometimes, peace.

That shaped me.

I became someone who naturally measures the downside. I think in scenarios. I calculate what could go wrong before allowing myself to imagine what could go right.

It also led me towards entrepreneurship.

I was naïve then.

I thought starting a business could make me rich quickly. Build something. Achieve explosive growth. Sell it. Exit with enough money to never feel financially vulnerable again.

The familiar startup dream.

It did not happen that way.

Entrepreneurship broke parts of me. It humbled me. It exposed how little I knew about people, timing, capital, execution and myself.

Then I returned to corporate employment.

The business did not give me the quick wealth I wanted. But it changed what I wanted wealth for.

At first, I wanted money.

Later, I wanted legacy.

Legacy stopped meaning only a business

For a period, legacy meant building a company that could outlive me.

Then the definition became wider.

I started to ask what I was actually trying to leave behind.

A business?

A portfolio?

A reputation?

Useful work?

Or a family with a healthier emotional inheritance than the one I received?

The last question stayed.

Growing up, I never felt that I truly had the kind of family I later wanted.

There were people around me. There were legal and blood relationships. But there was not always a consistently loving, nurturing and peaceful space.

I did not fully understand how much that affected me.

For years, I was mostly trying to survive it, then move beyond it.

Only later did I realise that part of my desire to start a family came from wanting to build the home I never really experienced.

Not a perfect home.

A safe one.

A warm one.

A place where love did not constantly feel conditional or unstable.

That was not something money could build by itself.

But money could help protect it.

Then I met my wife

My wife was Malaysian when we met.

She came from a well-to-do family and had been a carefree Singapore Airlines cabin crew. Today, she is a dietitian working in Singapore’s public healthcare system.

I had moved from corporate employment into entrepreneurship, then eventually back into corporate life.

Our paths were different, but our values aligned quickly.

She held strong principles. She wanted the right person to settle down and build a family with.

So did I.

Everything clicked faster than I expected.

We did not enter marriage casually. We were not looking only for companionship, lifestyle compatibility or a beautiful wedding.

We wanted a family.

We knew marriages could end and commitments could be renegotiated when they became difficult. But we did not want to build ours around the availability of the exit.

Every major decision after that was made with one underlying objective:

Hold the family together.

The wealth we built, the home we chose and increasingly our career decisions were for the family, not only for what they gave us individually.

Investing in the next generation became a priority.

The desire was one of the easiest decisions we made.

Sustaining it required much more work.

We did not begin with inherited certainty

There was no trust fund, inherited property waiting to be passed down or large financial gift that could absorb the cost of raising children.

Nor did we have dependable logistical support we could automatically call upon whenever work became demanding, somebody fell ill or we simply ran out of energy.

By the time we became parents, we were not financially helpless.

But what we had, we had largely built ourselves.

That distinction mattered.

We had reserves. Careers. Skills. A home. Some ability to plan.

What we did not have was the comforting knowledge that if everything failed, another family balance sheet would rescue ours.

So yes, we were afraid financially.

It would be dishonest to say otherwise.

Housing, pregnancy, delivery, insurance, infant care, medical expenses, food, transport and education were only the visible costs.

The larger cost was reduced flexibility.

Once another life depended on us, neither of us could make decisions as though we were acting alone.

What fatherhood actually cost

We gave up sleep, a lot of it, and many date nights as well.

Spontaneity became logistics.

My wife had already given up the freedom of flying and moved into a more settled professional life.

I became less interested in chasing the corporate ladder purely for titles and remuneration. Not because ambition disappeared, but because each promotion had to be evaluated against the time, energy and presence it might remove from home.

Our retirement plan slowed down.

Disposable income had more claims on it.

Career risk became harder to take.

Even simple things—exercise, dinner with friends, golf, quiet time—had to be negotiated with a household calendar.

These were genuine trade-offs.

But we rarely described them as sacrifices.

A sacrifice feels like something taken from you.

We gave these things up willingly for a common cause we had chosen together.

That did not make them free.

It made them meaningful.

There is no single price for raising a child

Whenever people discuss the cost of children in Singapore, we often speak as though there is one standard package.

There is not.

Do parents need a car?

It can be useful. Especially with young children, elderly parents or difficult schedules.

But it is still a luxury, not an automatic requirement.

Do we need a live-in helper because there is a toddler in the house?

Some families genuinely do.

We decided to manage our own cleaning and chores for now. Well.. we also manage our own expectations on the standard of cleanliness.

Do children need every enrichment class available?

Mine are still too young for me to pretend I know the answer.

But the principle should remain the same:

What is necessary?

What is genuinely beneficial?

And what is simply anxiety, comparison or peer pressure dressed up as responsible parenting?

The cost of parenthood is real.

But part of that cost is also shaped by the model of parenthood we choose.

Singapore can make parents feel that every advantage must be purchased early, or the child will somehow fall behind permanently.

I am not immune to that fear.

I just do not want fear to design our entire family.

We could have chosen somewhere else

I am Singaporean.

My wife was Malaysian.

We both had Australian visas.

The idea of raising our family somewhere else was not entirely theoretical.

We considered the broad possibilities across Singapore, Malaysia and Australia.

Each offered something different.

Malaysia could provide more space and potentially lower daily costs, depending on where and how we lived. Australia offered a different pace, more nature and perhaps a less compressed childhood.

Singapore was the most expensive and, in many ways, the most rigid.

I would still choose Singapore.

Why Singapore remains my choice

As parents, we naturally want what we believe is best for our children.

Part of that is safety and education. Part of it is also reducing unnecessary uncertainty—not only for our children, but for us as parents responsible for making decisions on their behalf.

Safety can be managed in many countries. Good parents build routines, choose environments carefully and remain alert wherever they live.

Singapore nevertheless gives us a very high baseline without requiring us to engineer it ourselves every day.

The education question was harder.

After comparing the three countries, my judgment was that Singapore’s education system remained the strongest default for a general child.

Not necessarily the best for every child.

Not the least stressful.

Not the most creative in every dimension.

It is structured. Rigorous. Predictable. Sometimes too rigid. Sometimes unnecessarily competitive.

But for parents who do not yet know their child’s exact strengths, limitations or future needs, structure has value.

It removes some uncertainty.

There is a clear system. A recognised baseline. Accessible schools. Established pathways. Support structures we understand.

Should either of our children eventually need a different environment, we can reassess.

A decision is not a permanent truth.

But as a starting point, Singapore offered the clearest foundation for us.

There was another factor.

I believe that if our family genuinely encountered hardship, Singapore’s institutions would not simply leave us in the lurch.

That does not mean life here is cheap.

It does not mean every policy is sufficient, or that help arrives automatically.

But being Singaporean gives us access to a functioning system: public healthcare, schools, infrastructure, security and forms of social support that create a floor beneath the family.

That is a kind of privilege too.

Not inherited wealth, but institutional security.

And when there is no family safety net behind you, the strength of the national safety net matters more.

Financial optimisation has no natural finish line

There was always a rational reason to wait.

Earn more first. Reduce the mortgage. Build a larger reserve. Secure the next promotion.

Wait until work became less demanding, childcare became easier, we had more family support or Singapore somehow became cheaper.

The spreadsheet never said, “Now.”

It simply produced another condition.

That is the problem with financial optimisation.

It is very good at identifying what could be improved.

It is less capable of telling us when enough is enough.

At some point, I had to ask:

When does financial optimisation stop helping us build a good life, and start preventing us from living the life we actually want?

Money could tell us whether we were being reckless.

It could help us model our cash flow, protect an emergency floor and understand what kind of lifestyle we could realistically sustain.

It could not decide what our family should become.

The children are not the financial return

Children are not investments. They do not owe us achievement, companionship in old age, emotional fulfilment or repayment for what we spent raising them.

I did not become a father because I expected a return, nor would I tell anyone that children are automatically “worth the money”.

That language reduces a human life into a transaction.

The point is that some things can matter deeply without generating a measurable economic return.

I am privileged to be their father.

Not because they owe me anything, but because I get to witness who they become and carry the responsibility of helping them get there.

My son changed our use of money, time and energy.

He also filled our home with a type of life that did not exist before him.

We liked it enough to choose a second child.

That probably says more about our judgment than any argument I could write.

Will we have a third?

I do not know.

So far, the second child is already making the future feel more demanding.

We are more tired. The logistics will become more complicated. The cost base will rise.

Our finances may need to be recalibrated properly before we decide whether our family should expand again.

This is where desire must meet evidence.

Two children remain a decision we are willing and able to sustain.

A third requires a fresh decision.

Not a continuation made automatically because we have already chosen parenthood.

Our energy may say no.

Our finances may say not yet.

Our hearts may eventually say yes.

We will have to judge again.

My judgment

If time could reverse, would I make the same decision?

Yes. In a heartbeat.

I would probably do it earlier.

Not because fatherhood was easier than expected. It was not. But because I now know that waiting for complete financial certainty would only have delayed a life I already wanted.

I did not choose fatherhood because I had eliminated the risks.

I chose it because preserving every possible option was not the life I wanted most.

My wife and I wanted a family strongly enough that it became the organising principle behind many of our decisions.

We accepted less sleep, less flexibility and slower financial progress.

We did not accept financial recklessness.

That distinction matters.

Cost informed the decision.

It established the boundaries.

It forced us to think carefully about how we wanted to raise our children and what we were willing to give up.

But money did not receive the final vote.

Some of life’s most important decisions cannot be evaluated using money alone.

The numbers must be survivable, the risks understood and the commitment real.

I cannot remove the uncertainty for anyone considering children. Nobody can.

But I hope this thought process makes the decision feel less amorphous: identify the true costs, define what is necessary, protect a financial floor, understand the trade-offs, and decide what kind of life you actually want.

After that, judgment has to do what the spreadsheet cannot.