You will turn the terms of one real issue into a dated table of every payment you would receive.
Hui Min has narrowed it down. She wants to hold one real Singapore bond and understand every dollar it will pay her before she spends anything. The terms are online, spread over a web page and a PDF full of legal wording. This exercise turns that into a table she can read in ten seconds, and you will do the same for an issue of your own.
Set aside about 20 minutes. You need a spreadsheet or a sheet of paper, and the official page for one bond, SSB, T-bill or fixed deposit.
Start with the source that owns the facts. For SGS bonds, T-bills and SSBs, that is the Singapore Government Securities section of the MAS website, which lists each issue with its code, dates and rate. For a retail corporate bond, use the issuer's own page and the product highlights sheet, and check the listing on SGX if it trades there. For a fixed deposit, use the bank's rate page and its terms and conditions.
Avoid forum posts and screenshots. They are often out of date, and you are building something you will rely on.
Write down seven things before you build anything:
Issuer: who owes you the money. Face value: the amount repaid at maturity, per unit you hold. Coupon: the yearly interest rate on face value. Payment frequency: once or twice a year, or at maturity only. Issue date: when the loan starts. Maturity date: when the face value comes back. Call date or special features: anything that lets the timetable change.
If a field does not apply, write "none" rather than leaving it blank. A blank could mean you forgot to look.
Here is a made-up corporate bond so you can see the method before you use real terms. The issuer is a made-up company. The coupon is 3.2% a year, paid half-yearly. The bond was issued on 15 March 2025 and matures on 15 March 2028. There is no call date.
Use a S$1,000 holding. A yearly coupon of 3.2% on S$1,000 is S$32, and paid half-yearly that becomes S$16 every six months. Each payment date falls on 15 March or 15 September.
Your table has one row per payment date and three columns: coupon, principal and total. The rows run like this. On 15 September 2025, S$16 coupon, no principal, S$16 total. On 15 March 2026, the same. Then 15 September 2026, 15 March 2027 and 15 September 2027, each S$16. On 15 March 2028, the final row shows S$16 coupon plus S$1,000 principal, S$1,016 in total.
That is six rows. Add up the total column and you get S$1,096: S$96 of interest over three years and S$1,000 back. If your sum is different, check the number of rows first. The most common slip is counting years instead of payment dates, which gives three rows instead of six.
In practice a payment date that falls on a weekend or public holiday is usually paid on the next business day. The terms will say which convention applies, so copy what they say.
The same table works for the other products in this course, with small changes.
For an SSB, the rate is different in each year, so the coupon column changes every two rows. Use the schedule MAS publishes for that issue. Interest is paid every six months, so a S$1,000 SSB held for ten years gives twenty rows. You will read these schedules properly in lesson 3.1, How SSB step-up interest works.
For a T-bill, there is no coupon. You pay less than face value at the start and get face value back at maturity, so the table has two rows: what you pay on the issue date as a negative figure, and S$1,000 on the maturity date. Lesson 4.1 explains the discount.
For a fixed deposit, interest is often paid only at maturity, so you may have a single row with principal and interest together. Work the interest out from the rate and the term in the bank's terms.
The table assumes everything happens as written. Before you call it finished, look for anything that could change it.
A call option lets the issuer repay early on set dates. If the issuer could call the bond in March 2027, your last two rows might never happen. A step-up feature changes the coupon at a set point, often if the bond is not called. A perpetual has no maturity date at all, so your table has no last row until the issuer chooses one. An SSB can be redeemed by you in any month, which shortens the table at your choice rather than the issuer's.
Write one line under your table naming any such feature, or "none found" if you checked and there are none. That note matters as much as the numbers, because it tells you how firm the timetable really is.
When your table adds up and the note is written, you have the same thing Hui Min ended with: a plain record of what you would be lending, to whom, and when each dollar comes back. Now do it with real terms for the issue you chose.
Complete the bond terms template for one real issue and submit the payment table with a note on any feature that could change it.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).