I Stopped Converting Prices to Won Around Year Three: What Six Years in Singapore Did to How I Spend Money

 The first month we lived here, I converted every single price into Korean won in my head before buying anything. Every coffee, every grocery run, every taxi. My wife did the same thing, and we'd occasionally compare notes at the end of the day about how insane something had been, four dollars for a small coffee, twelve dollars for a plate of pasta at a food court that wasn't even good. Six years later I couldn't tell you today's exchange rate without looking it up.

That shift is the actual story of adjusting financially here, and it happened slowly enough that I didn't notice it happening.

Things I Stopped Buying Almost Immediately

Bottled water was the first casualty. I brought that habit from Korea without thinking about it, buying packs of bottled water for the apartment for the first two or three months, until a colleague looked at me strangely and pointed out Singapore tap water is genuinely fine to drink straight from the tap. It is. I'd been spending maybe twenty dollars a month on something coming out of my kitchen sink for free.

Convenience store runs went next. Back home, a 7-Eleven run at eleven at night was just a normal thing you did. Here the markup on almost everything at a convenience store is high enough that I started noticing it, and now if we need something at eleven at night, it usually just waits until tomorrow unless someone's sick.

Clothes shopping changed shape too, though less from cost and more from climate. I own maybe four pairs of long pants now, total, and two of them are for the office. Everything else got given away years ago after sitting untouched in a wardrobe for eighteen months in a country where it's twenty-eight degrees every single day of the year.

Eating out shifted in a way I didn't predict either. Early on we treated hawker centres as the budget option and restaurants as the normal option, which is backwards from how anyone who actually lives here thinks about it. Now hawker food is just food, what we eat most days without thinking about it, and a proper restaurant meal is a deliberate occasion two or three times a month. That reframing alone probably changed our monthly food spending more than any conscious budgeting ever did.

Where I Now Spend Money Without Blinking

Aircon is the big one. That first year, we ran it sparingly and felt slightly guilty about the bill each month, treating it like an indulgence the way we would have back home. Now I run it most nights without a second thought, because after enough humid nights of sleeping badly and dragging through the next day at work, I did the math differently. It's not really a utility bill, it's the cost of functioning properly the next morning.

Grab is another one. I resisted it for a long time, felt wasteful compared to just taking the MRT, and the MRT here is genuinely excellent so it wasn't a hard argument to make. But with two young kids and groceries and a stroller, at a certain point the twelve dollars stops being an indulgence and starts being the thing that determines whether the whole afternoon goes smoothly or falls apart at the platform stairs. I wrote about the wider version of that calculation in Why I Converted My Driving Licence in Singapore but Still Refuse to Buy a Car, and the same logic applies at a smaller daily scale.

Domestic help was the biggest mental adjustment of all. Coming from Korea, hiring a live-in helper felt genuinely foreign as a concept, something wealthy families did. Here it's simply how a huge number of dual-income households with young kids function, and once we actually understood the cost structure, including the levy concession we qualified for, the calculation looked completely different than it did from the outside.

Things That Still Feel Expensive After Six Years

Some things never stopped stinging. Cars are the obvious one, and I've made my peace with never owning one here. But the smaller ones surprise me more.

Korean groceries still make me wince every time, even though I've found the cheaper sources over the years. A box of Korean pears at a certain time of year costs enough that I take a photo and send it to my brother in Seoul purely to hear him react.

Alcohol is another one that never normalized. Singapore's duties on alcohol are steep enough that a beer at a bar can cost more than a full meal at a hawker centre, and I still catch myself doing a double take at bar menus after six years, which apparently is not something you fully adapt to.

The Habit That Actually Saved Us the Most

Here's the one that isn't about any specific purchase. Somewhere around year three, we started actually reviewing our recurring monthly charges, properly, once every six months or so, sitting at the dining table with a laptop after the kids were down.

That review is how we found we'd been paying north of fifty dollars a month on a mobile plan when a ten dollar plan covered everything we actually used, which I ended up writing about separately in Why I Finally Dumped StarHub After Six Years of Overpaying for a SIM Card. It's how we noticed a subscription we'd forgotten about entirely, and a home insurance renewal that had quietly gone up. None of these were huge individually. Stacked together across a year, it was real money we'd been leaking purely out of inattention.

There was also a stretch in year two where we tried to be too disciplined about all of this, tracking everything in a spreadsheet, cutting things that arguably shouldn't have been cut. That lasted about four months before we both quietly stopped, mostly because it made ordinary Saturdays feel like an audit. The version that actually stuck was much looser, review the recurring stuff properly twice a year, then stop thinking about the daily small purchases entirely.

The thing about living somewhere expensive is that it's rarely the big obvious costs that hurt most, those you notice and plan around. It's the small recurring stuff that just quietly renews itself every month while you're busy with work and kids and everything else, and nobody's ever going to send you an email pointing it out.

Six years in, I still catch myself doing conversions occasionally, usually only for something unexpectedly expensive, and mostly out of habit rather than any real need. But most days I just look at a price in Singapore dollars and know immediately whether it's fair or not, without any mental arithmetic at all, which is probably the clearest sign that this stopped being somewhere we moved to and started just being where we live.

Related reading:

The Honest Breakdown of My Monthly Cost of Living in Singapore as a Family of Four

Why I Finally Dumped StarHub After Six Years of Overpaying for a SIM Card

How to Buy Korean Groceries and Essential Supplies at the Lowest Prices in Singapore