You will be able to gather income, spending, assets, debts, existing policies and CPF information without missing anything a recommendation depends on.
Ravi tells Wei Ling he has "no insurance at all". Twenty minutes later, going through his finances, it turns out he has group term life and hospitalisation cover through his employer, MediShield Life like every Singapore Citizen and PR, and a small policy his mother bought for him when he was a teenager, which he had forgotten about. If Wei Ling had taken his first answer at face value, her recommendation would have been built on a picture that was wrong.
This is the part of the fact-find where accuracy matters most, and where most mistakes come from guessing.
Collect the financial picture before you talk about any product. Once a product is on the table, every number the client gives you starts to bend towards it, and so does your reading of the numbers.
Cover five areas. Income: what each person takes home each month after CPF, plus bonuses and any irregular income, noted separately because they cannot be relied on. Regular spending: housing, food, transport, loans, allowances to parents, childcare, insurance premiums already being paid. Savings and investments: cash, fixed deposits, investments, and what each is earmarked for. Debts: home loan, car loan, study loans, credit card balances. Dependants: who relies on the client's income, and for how long.
Ask for figures. "Around S$2,000" is acceptable when the client genuinely does not know. "I don't spend much" is not a figure. Where clients are unsure of spending, ask them to look at a recent bank statement or their banking app during the meeting, or to send the figure afterwards.
Next, list every existing policy. The ones a client mentions first are rarely the whole list, so prompt for the rest: individual policies with any insurer, anything their parents bought for them years ago, and cover through an employer.
For each one, record what it pays and when. That means the type of cover, the sum assured or benefit, who is covered, who the policy owner is, the premium, and when cover ends. A death benefit of S$200,000 that ends at 65 is a different thing from one that lasts for life. A hospitalisation plan that pays a ward class the client would not choose is a different thing from one that does.
Group cover through an employer needs particular care. Clients often do not know what they have, so ask them to check their employee benefits portal or ask HR. And note in the fact-find that group cover usually depends on staying in that job. If Ravi changes employer, or is retrenched, that cover may stop, sometimes at exactly the moment he needs it. Group cover still counts, but it counts differently.
Some cover comes through national schemes. MediShield Life, CareShield Life for those it applies to, and the Dependants' Protection Scheme for CPF members who have not opted out may all be part of the picture. Check with the client which apply to them, and look up what each scheme currently covers on the CPF Board and MOH websites rather than describing benefits from memory.
CPF balances matter for many recommendations: they affect housing, retirement adequacy, and in some cases how premiums can be paid. They are also the numbers clients are most likely to guess wrong.
So do not guess, and do not let the client guess. Ask them to log in to the CPF website with Singpass, either before the meeting or during it, and read the balances from the screen. Record the balance in each account and the date you read it. If they are comfortable, they can also check their CPF nominations on the same visit, which you will need in module 7.
Ravi logs in at the table. His Ordinary Account balance is lower than he thought, because he used it for the flat he co-owns with his parents and had forgotten how much went in. That changes how much he can rely on CPF for his own housing later, and it goes into the fact-find.
Some things cannot be checked in the meeting. The client may have left the policy documents at home, their employer's benefits summary may be a year out of date, or they may give you a spending figure they believe and cannot show you.
Record those items as unverified. A short note against each one is enough: "Group hospitalisation: client unsure of ward class, to confirm with HR." "Monthly spending: client estimate, no statement reviewed." Then follow up the ones that matter before you finalise a recommendation.
This does two things. It reminds you which parts of the picture are soft, so you can test your recommendation against them. And it shows a reviewer exactly what your advice rested on. A recommendation built on a client's estimate, clearly labelled as one, is defensible. The same recommendation with the estimate written down as fact is not, if the estimate turns out to be wrong.
All of this fits on one page if you lay it out well. Cash flow at the top, income against spending, with the monthly surplus or shortfall. Then assets and debts. Then existing cover, policy by policy, with what each pays and when it ends. Then CPF balances with the date read. And a column or symbol showing which figures are verified and which are not.
Keeping it to one page forces you to decide what matters, and it gives the client something they can check. In the activity below you build that snapshot for a practice client, and you mark anything you could not verify.
Build a one-page financial snapshot for a practice client covering cash flow, assets, debts, existing cover and CPF, marking anything unverified.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).