Trading Citizenship for HDB Loan
A profound story, imho, about someone I don’t know, told by a totally flustered housing agent.
In the midst of finding a flat, I came across such a situation. The seller, let’s call him Uncle, has a wife (Aunty) who is bankrupt. Both are Malaysian PRs, no idea about their job situation, but certainly not in perfect situation as they have missed a few payments to HDB for their flat.
So they engaged an agent to try to sell the flat quickly so that they could downgrade the flat (that was how I was involved, but it doesn’t matter). The agent spent money to advertise the flat, brought many people to view the flat, and was at the verge of closing the deal when she found out that Uncle still doesn’t want to give up.
First, Uncle talked to commercial banks and found out that he won’t get a rate as good as HDB. I mean, what would you expect? Defaulting payments and having a bankrupt wife doesn’t spell anything good in any financial institution’s books. Plus he was trying to use his daughter’s name, but his daughter refuse to let her dad tie her down with the property. Unsatisfied by what the banks offered him, he went to HDB to ask for extension. All this was unknown by the agent until we were almost closing the deal.
So this guy went to HDB to ask for mercy. Apparently he also enlisted the help of his MP, but to what extend the MP helped was unknown. Eventually HDB gave him an ultimatum: take up Singapore Citizenship, and pay only the interest portion of the loans for the past few months, and they will let him keep the flat while he figures out how to cough out the principle repayment later.
To me, what he did was really profound: he accepted that. Uncle made an agent ran around like a mad women without explaining his situation to her (level 1), try to force her daughter to register flat with him (level 2), negotiated and settled on a selling price with a buyer but leaving no signature on the OTP (level 3), asking an MP to help on a personal financial matter (level 4), and the most profound one: giving up one’s citizenship to exchange for keeping a HDB flat (level 5).
Perhaps you might say he would have switched his citizenship a long ago and had waited for this day for a long time (to use it as a bargaining chip for something). Well, I don’t know. I’m still trying to find a reasonable price for one’s citizenship, and this anecdote certainly doesn’t help. Well to be precise, he’s pricing it at a few months of principle payment, which is like less than $20,000?
Sigh, the way we get out of the messes in our lives…
i’m still trying to justify the benefits of changing citizenship too. the only good advantage i can think of is the passport. but it’s not as important to us as compared to (let’s say) indonesians. haha. well i don’t know….
go find a singaporean gf la!
sounds like someone just took up a new job in matrimonial services? The gahmen give grant in running that too!? 😀
It’s higher price for a Malaysian baby/child. Old “uncle”, hence S$20,000.
he probably like S’pore a lot!
hey, would like to see you write an article about the purpose of citizenship! Economic, racial or cultural reasons?
well i dont know about u but this clearly speaks to me about love and attachment of the uncle to his hdb flat.
i mean after going thru a few messes myself i clearly know that love is irrational and it can make pple do heroic actions in order to keep things they treasure including citizenship issues.
anyway only malaysians will want to keep hdb flats. sg pple ? nah most are in condos. and so the logic goes if u are staying in hdb flats and still not singaporeans then why not get the citzenship then everything will match instead of showing the wrong indicator all the time.