List the insurance and benefits an employer usually provides, and say which ones you no longer have.
When you leave a salaried job, the HR exit checklist usually covers returning your laptop, submitting your final claims and handing in your pass. It usually does not list the benefits you are giving up. Your group hospital plan, your outpatient card, any group life cover (which you may not have known about), your sick leave and your annual leave all end on your last day of employment. No notice is sent to tell you they have ended, and most new freelancers discover the losses one at a time, often at a clinic counter.
Employer packages in Singapore vary, so yours may have had more or fewer items than the common ones below. Check each one against what you actually had.
Group hospital cover pays towards hospital bills, often on top of national cover. Group outpatient cover pays for GP visits and sometimes specialists, dental or health screenings. Group term life pays a sum to your family if you die while employed, and the sum is often a multiple of your salary. Some employers also provide group critical illness cover or disability cover.
Leave is a benefit too. With paid sick leave and hospitalisation leave, an illness costs you days of feeling unwell while your pay continues. Without it, the same illness costs you a few days of income. Paid annual leave means a holiday does not cost you a week's earnings, and public holidays work the same way. The employer's share of CPF is also lost when you leave, as module 3 covered.
All of these depend on your employment and end when the job ends. Some group policies let a leaver convert to an individual policy within a short window after leaving. If you have only just left, check with your former employer's HR or the insurer straight away.
Work injury compensation rarely appears on a benefits list, because employers are legally required to have it. The Work Injury Compensation Act lets employees claim compensation for injuries and illnesses caused by their work without having to prove the employer was at fault. Employers must have insurance covering this for most of their staff. The Ministry of Manpower explains who is covered and what can be claimed.
The Act covers employees only, and most self-employed people have nothing in its place. Take a freelance photographer who falls from a ladder on a shoot, or a freelance trainer who injures a knee during a class (both invented examples). Neither has an equivalent scheme paying medical leave and compensation, so each bears the bills and the lost income themselves.
Platform workers are the exception. The Platform Workers Act brings work injury compensation to the ride-hail, taxi and delivery workers it covers, as Lesson 3.3 explained. Hafiz, the private-hire driver from module 3, has some injury cover through it. Mei, the freelance designer from earlier modules, has no work injury cover under that Act.
Some cover does not depend on a job. MediShield Life is the national basic health insurance for Singapore citizens and permanent residents, and it covers you for life, whether you are employed, self-employed or not working. It is designed for large hospital bills and certain costly outpatient treatments, in public hospitals and at the ward classes it is designed for. Lesson 4.1 of the course The Singapore personal finance system, "Hospital bills: what basic national cover pays and what shield plans add", explains what it pays and where its limits are. Premiums can be paid from MediSave, which is another reason the MediSave contributions covered in module 2 matter.
Insurance you bought personally stays in force as long as you pay the premiums, whether or not you have a job. That includes an integrated shield plan, a term life policy or a personal accident policy you took out while employed.
When Mei left her agency job, she wrote a gap list. These were its opening items:
Group hospital cover: lost. MediShield Life kept. No shield plan of her own yet. Outpatient card: lost. Group term life: lost. She had not known it existed. Sick leave: lost. Annual leave: lost. Work injury compensation: lost, nothing in its place. Employer CPF: lost, partly replaced by her voluntary CPF plan from module 3.
The list took her ten minutes, and it changed how she spoke to the adviser she met the next month.
Write your gaps down in your own words before you contact anyone who sells insurance. A person selling insurance tends to start from the products they sell. A written list makes the conversation start from your gaps, lets you judge each suggestion against a specific need, and makes you less likely to buy something you do not need because it was presented well.
Start with whatever you still have from your last job: an offer letter, a benefits booklet, an old payslip or an email from HR. Go through it item by item: hospital cover, outpatient cover, term life, any critical illness or disability cover, sick and hospitalisation leave, annual leave and public holidays, work injury compensation, and employer CPF. Mark each one as lost, kept or partly replaced, and note what replaces it, such as MediShield Life, a policy you bought yourself or a voluntary CPF plan. If you left recently, check with your former employer's HR or the insurer straight away about converting any group policy to an individual one. Then write the gaps in your own words. Only after that, speak to anyone who sells insurance, and judge each suggestion against a specific gap on your list.
Find whatever you still have from your last job: an offer letter, a benefits booklet, an old payslip or an email from HR. Go through it item by item, and mark each one as you go.
List every benefit from your last job. Mark each one kept, lost or replaced.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).