Jenée Devere

Regular use and cleaning of a car will, despite the best efforts, lead to swirl marks, chips and stains on the exterior of the vehicle. This is true even if the car is brand new. In addition, water spots, dirt, and grime start clinging to your car the day after you give it a thorough wash.

Yet there is a product that provides protection from all these environmental hazards which does not require repeated applications and which makes a car easier to maintain. This is ceramic coating, sometimes called nano-ceramic coating. The basic chemical composition of a ceramic coating is Silicon Dioxide (SiO2). Ceramic coatings may also be referred to as quartz coating.

Ceramic coating can be expensive, but this can be balanced out by the fact it adds value to your car. There are a lot of claims made about ceramic coating, not all of them entirely accurate, and much has been written for marketing purposes.

Ceramic coating offers both protection and shine to a vehicle that is not possible from careful washing on a regular basis, even if this is with the application of a new coat of wax every few months. Depending on the coating used they are suitable for use on paintwork, wheels, glass and plastic trim.

A ceramic coasting is a liquid polymer which is applied by hand to the outer surface of a vehicle. The coating creates a bond with the vehicles factory paint through a chemical reaction and this creates a protective layer that also shines.

There are many ceramic coating products on the market. The principle differences are the amount of Si02 content in the product. Some have levels as low as 5% or as high as 70%. Generally, the higher the level of SiO2 the more durable the product will be.

Ceramic coating is an alternative to a premium wax as it does not wash away or break down. Depending on the number of coats, it is either a permanent or semi-permanent bond and with appropriate maintenance can have your car looking like new for years with minimal maintenance. Many ceramic coatings installers offer warranties over several years, whilst also offering annual maintenance of the coating.

A ceramic coating will have your car looking like new, but it is not a maintenance-free if you want your car to continue to look good. The car will always get dirty so will need washing to maintain the shine, but this is usually less work than before to reach the same results.

Make sure to read my guide on how to correctly apply ceramic coating.

A ceramic coating can help preserve a vehicle’s exterior and reduce ongoing maintenance needs. However, it is not a miracle cure for every problem. Ceramic coating cannot eliminate all scratches, swirl marks, or rock chips.

In the marketing of ceramic coatings, claims are made that it improves hardness up to 9, or 9H. This doesn’t mean the coating is resistant to scratches, just that a pencil registered as 9H will not scratch it (pencils are graded from 1 – 9 with 9 being the hardest). Therefore, only the lightest abrasions will be protected by the ceramic coating and it certainly is not resistant to rock chips. For protection from rock chips, you need paint protection films, which are thick layers of a vinyl applied over the paint like a window tint installation. In the same way, ceramic coatings do not guarantee complete protection against chemicals, so bird droppings left on the car will affect the paint.

Ceramic coatings can self-repair, but on a minor scale, under extreme heat. Some ceramic coatings have enhanced the self-healing properties, but generally ceramic coatings usually don’t cause a scratch to disappear after a few days in the sun.

There are specific techniques to use when washing your car. If you do not use these washing techniques or if you use automated car washes swirl marks will be created on your vehicle’s surface even with the ceramic coating.

OMG NETWORK (OMG) ESSENTIALS

The OMG Network is a permissionless and trustless network for transferring value. It makes it possible to move assets directly from blockchain to blockchain without having to rely on third parties such as banks. It operates based on its own native cryptocurrency, OMG.

The OMG Network was initially developed by the Omise company as OmiseGO and later rebranded to OMG Network. After a successful ICO in 2017, OMG’s platform for cheap and unmediated transfers of assets across crypto networks was launched.

While traditional payment systems, such as Visa or PayPal can boast with considerably higher transaction rates than most blockchain-based cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum, they face a problem: centralization. Unlimited control over financial transactions in the hands of a single authority has been seen as one of the main problems that cryptocurrencies were created to solve in the first place. The OMG Network aims to bring the efficiency of traditional payment platforms onto the blockchain while reaping the benefits of both.

But to make quick and efficient blockchain transactions possible, the OMG Network would need to be able to facilitate a higher transaction throughput than offered by Ethereum’s base technology. For this reason, its design implements Plasma, a layer 2 scaling solution on top of Ethereum, which brings a substantial boost to transaction throughput compared to its base layer.

Through Plasma, OMG can facilitate high transaction rates, but still maintain all the benefits of the base blockchain. The reason lies in the fact that all final transaction states on the second-layer network are validated by the base-layer blockchain, which grants them the same level of transparency and security that is enjoyed by regular on-chain Ethereum transactions.

At the heart of the OMG Network is its own native cryptocurrency, OMG, which fuels the platform’s essential features and makes it possible to transfer assets seamlessly. OMG is based on proof of stake: it is generated through minting and earned by network validators who stake their coins in order to earn the right to validate blocks and keep the network running.

Any user can participate in OMG staking by locking some OMG on the network. This makes you eligible to receive rewards whenever minting a new block.

Transactions of OMG also incur a fee which is distributed proportionately to how many coins the users have staked in the network. OMG follows the Ethereum ERC-20 standard, guaranteeing its fungibility and making it possible to store it in any regular Ethereum-based wallet.

These two charts aren’t very specific, but suffice to demonstrate a general point. These are HDB flat prices over the past five years:

While these are overall private non-landed prices (without distinguishing new launches and resale):

Resale flat prices have made a spectacular climb from $443 psf to $550 psf, since 2018. This is a rise of just over 24 per cent.

Private non-landed prices have, on average, risen from $1,349 psf to $1,899 psf, an increase of around 40.7 per cent over the same time period.

It is generally true that, despite the sharp spike in resale flat prices, private homes have – as a whole – still outpaced the rising prices of HDB flats. Although this is not universally true (i.e., this all doesn’t consider district, new launch versus resale, age, or a myriad of other factors), it does mean that even historically high flat prices don’t mean it’s easy for everyone to upgrade.

It’s a large and nebulously defined group of people who could upgrade; but perhaps its clearer if we focused on who shouldn’t be considering it right now:

We’ve often pointed out that you should be able to service your mortgage for at least six months, even with a total loss of income – this can be saved either in your bank or your CPF.

If you’re going to upgrade to a private property, bear in mind that the savings fund for these six months has to grow accordingly. If you can’t meet the requirement, 2023 is likely to be a volatile year, and not one in which you should be taking chances.

This is also where perhaps it is worth highlighting the 3-3-5 rule of prudence (as unrealistic as some might deem it): You should have 30 per cent of the capital needed for your new property, the monthly loan repayment should be kept to 30 per cent of your monthly income or less*, and the total price shouldn’t be more than five times your combined annual income.

*For those who haven’t bought private property before, note that HDB regulated this for you when you bought a flat – your loan wouldn’t have been approved if it would have gone beyond 30 per cent of your monthly income.

However, you’re given much more leeway by banks, who allow up to 55 per cent of your monthly income to go toward loan repayments (this limit is inclusive of other debts like car loans). But just because you can, doesn’t always mean you should.

The interest rate floor, when determining your TDSR limit of 55 per cent, is currently set at four per cent.

For example, a loan for $1 million for 25 years is considered to have a monthly repayment of around $5,278, even if the actual interest rate on your package is lower.

This means a minimum income of around $9,596 per month is needed to qualify for such a loan (as repayments cannot exceed 55 per cent of your monthly income, inclusive of other debts).

You may find that, under the new interest rate floor, your income is insufficient to qualify for the desired loan amount. This usually means making a big down payment, and again paying more cash.

Besides this, do check on your CPF usage, and the amount you need to refund

If all this would mean wiping out your savings (see point 1), or leaving you with perilously low cash reserves, you’re probably not in a safe position to upgrade – not unless you can find a cheaper alternative.

ALSO READ: 5 hard-to-spot problems you should know before buying a condominium in Singapore

The average home loan interest rate is now climbing past three per cent, after over a decade at two per cent or below. It is not impossible that we may see rates as high as four per cent by end of the year, or even five per cent in the near future.

This is not a worry if you use an HDB loan however, which is always pegged at 0.1 per cent above the current CPF interest rate (frankly it almost never changes; it has been at 2.6 per cent for almost over 20 years by this point).

Buying a private property or an Executive Condominium requires you to leave the safety of the HDB loan, and turn to the banks. As such, people facing higher financial risks (e.g., gig economy workers, or small business owners facing a rocky economy) may not want to take on a mortgage at this point.

Note that we have no perpetual fixed-rate home loans in Singapore – all our fixed-rate loan packages only remain that way for a limited period (often three to five years) before reverting to a variable rate.

As an example of what can happen when you buy at a peak, check out our investigation into Urban Vista.

A significant number of unprofitable transactions (61 unprofitable to 19 profitable at the time) were at least in part due to timing: the launch of the property was in 2012, which was a run-up to peak prices in 2013. A subsequent slew of cooling measures then saw falling prices, and losses upon resale.

We’ve also recently seen two cooling measures (December 2021 and September 2022), which raised stamp duties and further curbed loans – this is a very clear sign that the government won’t hesitate to step in and force prices down further if they feel a dangerous bubble is forming.

All of these are danger signs for those who buy at the current peak, and expect to see fast returns (e.g., holding periods of five years or even less).

If you have sufficient holding power and can wait a long time, you might be able to ride out a coming down cycle and wait for the next peak. But if you don’t, or if you expect returns sooner than that, upgrading today can be seen as risky.

There is a fair argument that waiting longer could worsen your chances of upgrading later. When the supply of HDB flats increases, such as on the back of the ramped-up building in 2020 and 2021, we’re likely to see resale flat prices dip in the future.

Couple this with the speed at which private property prices are outpacing resale flat prices, and there may be an argument for some to make the jump while they can.

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Source: chem.libretexts.org