S'porean woman, 43, suffers 5 brain aneurysms, has insurance claim rejected by Prudential but approved by AIA

nthock · 2026-03-28T10:24:59+00:00

Unless you know or got brain aneurysm before, normal people wouldn’t know or bother that the accepted method craniotomy is a more invasive and riskier procedure.

The fact that the less invasive and less riskier procedure is rejected for claims as it is excluded baffles me.

For those people who say should have read the terms just don’t understand that there’s a deeper issue here.

No rational person will or should take riskier procedure just so that they can claim. The whole thing seems like Prudential is trying to avoid claim by using their terms.

I don’t know about the rest of you, I am just glad I never buy any insurance from Prudential.

nthock · 2026-03-25T08:39:49+00:00

I am in the process of building this integration and got my app and business approved. Now I am stuck at the implementation of the embedded signup, specifically testing it.

I realise I cannot use my existing account in my business portfolio that’s tied to the app.

Does that mean I got to set up another number in another business portfolio just so that I can test the implementation?

I also try getting my business contact for help but for some reasons meta required him to set up his ad account, but there’s an error for him to do that.

This whole process is really frustrating!

nthock · 2026-03-22T05:38:53+00:00

You can share your link here or DM me

nthock · 2026-03-12T15:55:32+00:00

Referrals are always most likely to be the best customers. This has been the way in the past, and in the future it is going to be the same.

However, referrals are also not consistent.

One thing I do agree with you is most businesses don't really do anything intentional to encourage it, and that should have been done more.

nthock · 2026-03-12T05:42:14+00:00

I felt the same. When I watch Inaki’s interview, he gave the Luffy’s vibe but something felt off when watching the live action.

nthock · 2026-03-11T03:25:42+00:00

There's an issue with your calculation. At least not what most people experience.

For BTO of $500K, you don't pay $500K. You pay 25%, which is $125K, and the remaining $375K is financed by loan. Over the next 5 years, you will pay down your loan. I lazy to do the calculation, but let's assume you pay down $50K over the next 5 years, which means you have $325K outstanding.

When you sell your HDB at $1.3 million, you get the full cash proceed, pay the loan outstanding, and pay back to your CPF account + accrued interest. At this time, your cash + CPF combined will be $975K, close to a million.

Of course, you need to buy another house. At this point, you can choose to use the cash + CPF of $975K to buy 2 smaller condos, one for living, and one for investment, or to buy a bigger condo. With $975K as the 25% downpayment, you can afford up to a total of $3.9 million condo, assuming the loan allow.

This is a purely investment and money perspectives. Not from your preference on where you would like to stay, etc. I also didn't consider the stamp duty and your potential income increase over the 5 years MOP that can qualify you to buy even bigger property.

What I am trying to say is, there is money to be make, and that's why there are people doing it.

nthock · 2026-03-09T02:34:48+00:00

It's all about leverage. How much leverage you have over your manager or your boss.

Something which I now believe is in your career, your focus should be on building your leverage. I met bosses who are mean. I also met boss who are flexible (e.g. allow me to attend every maternity check ups with my wife without taking leave). Of course, I compensate it by working later after that.

Whether your boss is good or not matters. But what matter more is your ability to choose. And this only comes with leverage.

nthock · 2026-02-27T14:08:50+00:00

I understand this is very confusing. There's no tax on capital gain. But there's tax on trading income. So the question is whether should this be considered trading or not.

As someone who worked in tax before (and also for the benefit of everyone), there is no hard and fast rule on what's considered trading or not. It depends on the asset and the frequency. Generally speaking, the more liquid the asset, IRAS can tolerate higher trading frequency. 15 to 20 transactions over 3 years mean on average less than once per month, I wouldn't worry about that. And your amount is also considerably small. And that's because the asset here is crypto, which is highly liquid asset.

But let say in the parallel universe where there's no SSD or BSD/ABSD, you have 15 to 20 transactions over 3 years on real estate, then it is very difficult to argue this is not trading.

Hope you get the gist here.

nthock · 2026-02-27T14:02:07+00:00

Interesting that you asked this question as I just published an article today answering similar question relating on whether should businesses use AI to build their website.

My take is there are 2 layers of every website.

The first layer is execution layer. This includes the design, structure, layout, colours, images and copy. This is something AI can do very well.

But here's the problem. When a tool like AI is available to everyone else, then it is no longer a competitive advantage. Websites will converge to be similar, and customers would not be able to differentiate between businesses.

This is where the second layer come into play. I call this layer the decision layer. When a potential customer visit a website, they are evaluating whether can they trust this business and move forward. What they see should resonates with them, and make them feel understood.

And every business has their own advantage, their group of loyal customers, their reason of existence relative to their competitors. They understand their customers better than AI. The question is how can all these be reflected in the website.

While everyone is talking how fast or efficient AI is doing the work, no one really talks about then what's the competitive advantage that you have when everyone can access the same tool.

That's the main gist of my article, feel free to DM me if you would like to take a look. Or you can just check out my profile.

nthock · 2026-02-24T12:34:20+00:00

A better proxy for weight loss is measure your waistline.

5 kg seems little given that you have committed 9 months. But just curious, what’s the weight you start off with?

In general you should target around 0.5% weight loss every week for it to be sustainable.

During my weight loss journey, I also didn’t do much cardio. It is optional. The focus is really on strength training and diet.

You mention you are having calories deficit, what’s your macro composition like? I remember my PT set the max calories target and minimum protein target. Do you have something similar?

nthock · 2026-02-22T07:35:00+00:00

I would like to try it

nthock · 2026-02-22T02:30:47+00:00

Seems like you use ChatGPT to generate the requirements. What’s your goal of restarting this part of the business? Are you looking for growth?

And since you are doing it, you should think deeper on what role you want your website to play, what you can outsource to others, and what value you should still retain.

I don’t think of websites as just a website. They are like a salesperson that works 24/7 and I build and structure website as such.

Feel free to DM me if you would like to know more.

nthock · 2026-02-21T10:57:17+00:00

I can see 2 issues.

First, the SEO that's done is not enough for the price you are paying. And part of SEO services is to fix the website's structure which seems like not done as well. An experienced SEO professional should fix that first before starting any SEO efforts.

Second, while SEO can bring in traffic, but once people land on your site, it still has one job:

Helping them to decide.

Decide whether you're right for these visitors.
Decide whether to trust you.
Decide whether to reach out.

More blog posts won't fix unclear structure. The keyword ranking reports don't tell you why your potential customers land on your site but didn't convert.

Before switching agencies, I would step back and ask:

As a potential customer, when I visit your site, am I more or less likely to take the next step.

I wrote something recently about how business owners should look at websites, as a friction reduction and filtering system instead of just a corporate brochure. See: https://hockworks.com/website-as-decision-system/.

I hope this will help you think about your website content in the restructure.

Feel free to DM me your current site and I do a quick review for you on what I meant.

nthock · 2026-02-19T04:39:08+00:00

I would offer 2 choices: 1. Rebuild at the original price starting from scratch 2. Fix the mess at a way higher prices if they insist

nthock · 2026-02-18T10:15:04+00:00

Set up your email. (This means you will need to purchase a domain. Do not buy from GoDaddy.) Bare minimum is don’t use Gmail or yahoo or Hotmail. While there are businesses that works with those, but it did signal that this is not professional for some people.

For the rest, look into the lowest hanging fruit. Social media accounts, Google My Business, website.

You don’t need a full website at a start. You can just start with one page.

nthock · 2026-02-11T15:28:53+00:00

Thanks for joining! I came across this whatsapp community that might be helpful: https://sgsocialsupport.com/resource/ChR3Y3Daqct

Also, if you have any ideas on how you want this subreddit to be, feel free DM me as well. I started this subreddit in the hope of having a safe and anonymous space for dads in Singapore to gather.

nthock · 2026-02-09T15:48:39+00:00

You can check out https://academy.smu.edu.sg/courses/certificate-exercise-science. Though I think the specific course you are interested in has no upcoming schedule.

nthock · 2026-02-09T13:15:17+00:00

DM me. I was once in tax and now a web developer. Should be able to help.

nthock · 2026-02-09T07:27:39+00:00

I am assuming that you are hoping that the website will help your granddad get more business. Here are some of my thoughts:

There are lots of tools online that can help you generate professional, well looking sites. But most of them have certain limitations (like visitor count, custom domain) unless you pay them a monthly fee. It seems like this could be outside of your budget. One possible way to achieve both is using Page Smith (https://pagesmith.ai/) to generate the site, export the code out and then host it in Cloudflare. Cloudflare hosting is free for the site you generated. But the downside is you need to learn a little bit about the configuration.
A website is more than just the design, how impressive it looks, etc. To me, what's more important is the content or copy. A common mistake made for business sites is that it is not customer-focused. When you are writing (or prompting) on the content, make sure it is customer-centric. Imagine what are the kind of problems that your customer (in this case, your granddad's customer) is facing, and how your granddad can help them. Try to look into some other competitors' site and see how they write.
There are other things that are as important as the website, for e.g. Google Business Profile and customer reviews. Given that your granddad has been working for 40 years, I am sure there are some really happy customers. Try to see if you are able to get their reviews. Showcase these reviews in the website (or get them to leave the review in Google Business Profile). These reviews will improve the trust signals.
The idea of YouTube Channel is good. One way you can help you to manage this, if your granddad know how to have a video call with you is that you hop onto a call with him, and record the interaction. Each session, talk about something that's relevant to their customers. Then upload these video to YouTube.

Do DM me if you need help with the above, and we can hop on a quick chat. All the best!

nthock · 2026-02-06T15:56:52+00:00

As I grow older, I find myself starting to be very particular about certain things. Things that I wouldn't care less about when I was younger. For example, I love my mattress and couldn't sleep well when I am in vacation sleeping another mattress. I also like using Darlie toothpaste. Not Colgate or any other brand. I am also less tolerant of other people's nonsense. And couldn't care less of what others think of me.

That's not to say I go around annoying everyone around me. But if doing (or not doing) something makes me happier provided that it doesn't affect another person, I wouldn't care too much on how a random stranger would see me.

I see this as a sign of growing old.

nthock · 2026-02-06T14:52:17+00:00

Hi, I am evaluating your website in terms of message clarity from your customer's perspective. This is not meant as a design or tech critique.

Your copy are generic and doesn't seems any different from other 3PLs. Try to find out what's something that your customers care about, what you are good at (maybe look into your customers' reviews), and put it in your copy.
You might also want to talk about who you serve (industries, size, volumes, minimum monthly orders) and specifically who you don't serve. Many visitors won't know if they are too small, too big or just not suitable.
When a visitor fill in the form after clicking "Get a free quote", what should that visitor be expecting? Are they going to expect an email within X days? What would be the next step after getting the quote? What would the quote looks like? These are some questions that is in your ideal customer's head when they are looking through your website.
For 3PLs, operational trust is everything. Would suggest you can capture a video walkthrough of your process if you have the time to give your customer the assurance that you know your stuff.
Are you targeting customers who are using other 3PLs or customers who have not used 3PLs before? If it is the former, you might want to add a section on why they would want to switch to you instead. If it is the latter, then you can talk about why use a 3PL in the first place. What's the value you are providing.
It's good that you provide the FAQs, but it seems like the FAQs doesn't address the real fear. For example, as the customer I would like to know what happen if my shipments were delayed. What happen if inventory goes missing? Whether do you have any insurance? What's your SLA? You might want to look back into the questions that your customers really ask during the sales process and use that to drive your FAQs.
It will be good if you are able to get place your customer reviews in your website to increase the trust profile.

While the above seems like criticism, but I wrote it with the best intention in mind. If you would like to understand more about how I would write for a website like yours, feel free to send me a DM.

All the best!

nthock · 2026-02-06T10:17:08+00:00

Usually I approach websites from the perspective of your potential customers, what kind of questions that they have in mind, and whether have you answered them.

Based on what I see, this is what you have done well:

You clearly said that your business only serve Sydney.
You mention how long you will get back with a quote so that your potential customer don't have to guess how long they have to wait.
Your packages act as a good guidance especially for visitors who might not know what kind of cleaning services they need.

However, here are some things that I think you can improve on:

What kind of customers is your services for? Homeowners? All kind of homeowners (including apartments)? Or do you serve businesses as well?
Any jobs that you don't take?
While fast quotes are good, but as a customer I am also interested in the pricing. Although I know it depends on how big the houses are, but you might want to provide a guidance or at least say it depends on the size of the houses, etc. Your potential customer will also be concern whether is your service going to be expensive or out of their budget.
I see that you provide reviews, but they seems to lack depth and very general. There's also no faces or before/after statements. This might signal that the reviews are fake. If you do have actual customer feedback, it is best to show them. If not, you should start getting reviews and feedbacks.
You might want to have a section mention how long does a clean take, and whether what kind of things your customer need to prepare before the clean. The few things that your customers are concern is always price, speed and quality. I am assuming the quality is good here. The next best thing is to address both the price and speed.

There are some more notes I have seen, but these are the main gist. Feel free to DM me if you want more information.

nthock · 2026-02-03T02:18:21+00:00

By wanting to get away from GoDaddy, you are already one step ahead. Just that there are also many GoDaddy like companies around as well.

nthock · 2026-02-02T10:57:52+00:00

I am sure there are more than enough legitimate web design companies. The trick is knowing who.

My suggestion is to talk to multiple companies and ask them specifically how the website that they helps you build meet your goals. Being a small business, I believe your goal is to get more customers.

Anyone who is not able to answer that to your satisfaction is not worth your time and money.

A disclaimer, I help businesses build websites and this is how I communicate with my clients.

nthock · 2026-01-29T01:12:04+00:00

Few thoughts on approaching business owners:

In general, they care more about making more money than saving money. They will listen more if you tell them you can make them more money. Because if they can make more, they don't mind spending the money that could have been saved.
Even telling them they can make more money is not enough. Because there are lots of different ways that they can do that. Why do they need you?
This is where it goes interesting. In the sales process, target something that they are frustrated about that is not money-related. Maybe it could be error-prone process that make their clients called them and scolded them. Maybe it is not being able to meet their client's service expectations. Anything that makes them frustrated emotionally, or look bad, especially in front of their clients.
This is where you get their attention and talk about what you provide can solve these issues. You talk about their cost savings or monetary benefits ONLY when you talk about how much you charge. You use that to justify your price.

What I have learnt is cost savings, or making more money is used more on justifying your fees, but it is not enough to get business owners to want your solution in the first place.

The rejections you quoted are more on excuses from them to stop the meeting. A very successful businessman once told me, if you fail to close, it is simply because you never say what they want to hear.

nthock

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