1. Educate your kids
2. buy a home
3. Have adequate insurance
4. THEN start investing.

Asked what he believed to be the biggest mistakes he has seen people from Singapore making when investing abroad, he replied, “They don’t know what they’re doing. That’s the biggest mistake when investing anywhere, but especially overseas. Many people wind up investing in Norway when they can’t find Norway on the map.”

Investors, he said, should know currencies, bonds, governments, taxes and the like – everything, in short. “You have to know all that when investing in your own country, but even doubly when it’s a different country,” he said.