Melissa Tan

Melissa’s career in financial advisory didn’t start with a passion for spreadsheets. It started with frustration. After spending nearly a decade working directly with individual clients at a major Singapore financial institution, she saw the same pattern repeatedly: smart, hardworking Singaporeans felt completely overwhelmed by CPF rules, emergency fund targets, and household budgeting decisions.

She’d watch clients struggle with basic questions like “How much should I actually set aside for emergencies?” or “Am I maximizing my CPF contributions correctly?” These weren’t complicated questions — they just weren’t being answered clearly anywhere. So in 2019, she made the deliberate shift away from individual advisory work toward educational content creation, believing she could reach far more people by making financial planning genuinely understandable.

That year, she spearheaded a financial literacy initiative across five Housing and Development Board communities. It reached over 50,000 residents. Not through fancy marketing — just through clear, practical information grounded in Singapore’s actual regulatory environment.

Today, Melissa holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the National University of Singapore and is a certified financial planner with the Financial Planning Association of Singapore. But her real credential is this: she’s spent years translating technical MAS guidelines into language that actual people understand.