kid2kid wrote:Can anyone out there just give me a straightforward response and some helpful advice???
I was giving you a straight up answer. Advisors come crawling out of the woodwork here. Every expat here has been approached at least once via phone or email about an "opportunity" with an advisor, and many are also asked to pass on the cards of people they know. It is sometimes the theme of conversation over a beer.
An expat advisor is not going to get a Singaporean's business as they are a pretty tight knit crowd, and there are a rather limited number of expats... the number I heard is somewhere around 80,000... a small market with plenty of competition. There are lots of local financial advisors as well and lots of free, "educational" seminars deisgned to develop sales leads. You will also be competing against the private banking arms that all the big banks have.
As I said before expats who advise and end up here want to advise on the basis of what they know... they want to manage assets based in the home country. Or, they want me to take my entire investment program and convert it to something they know and I don't... a high risk for me.
You will also be competing against advisors who remain in the home country, which the expat may have been using for some time.
If you have global advising experience, with your pulse on ANZ, MY, KR, TH, and such, you have intimate knowledge of tax law as it relates expat investments, and you also have a knowledge of real estate in Asia, then maybe you could build a niche business for those expats who have investment portfolios in a home country but might wish to look at international investment opportunities outside the tax system of the home country. Business owners would be interested in how to protect profits from tax at sale of the business.
I'll be the first one to say that there are lots of ways to make money and perhaps you have the magic needed to be successful here. I just think that it's a hard market to break into... and that's from the point of view of the consumer, not as an advisor.