By Boo Kok Chuon

I read with interest The Straits Times article, “My second crib: They own homes in Singapore. So why are they renting abroad?“

The appeal is immediately obvious because one couple rents out a 68 sq m flat in Admiralty for $3,200 while renting a 250 sq m landed home in Malaysia for $900. Place those two numbers side by side and the arithmetic almost feels self-evident, as though you have discovered a simple optimisation problem where more space and lower cost automatically translate into a better outcome.

I do not dispute the numbers, I only wonder whether the numbers, on their own, are sufficient to describe the reality of how people actually live.

A Family “Second Crib” That Has Always Existed

My family has had a house in Johor Bahru for more than 30 years. My mother is Malaysian, many of our relatives are there, and Malaysia has always been part of our family life in a very organic way rather than as a deliberate “second base” strategy. My father bought a 4,100 sqft villa near today’s Mid Valley Southkey after selling a Singapore investment property 30 over years ago, and it is only a few minutes from the CIQ, which makes it extremely convenient.

Despite of that, my family continues to live in a much smaller apartment in Singapore.

If this were purely a question of maximising space per dollar, the answer would be obvious. But life rarely reduces itself to that kind of clean optimisation, especially when what you are optimising is not just cost but how you actually live your days.

I write this not as someone observing Malaysia from Singapore, but as someone whose life has long straddled both sides of the Causeway. And yet despite that dual exposure, Singapore has always remained home in a way that is not easily replaced by any amount of space elsewhere.

Before Covid: The “Optimised” Model

Before Covid, we did try a more Johor-centred arrangement where we worked across both sides and would sometimes stay overnight in Johor when late meetings made the return trip impractical. At that time it genuinely felt like a more efficient system, because costs were lower, space was abundant, and the physical proximity to Singapore made it seem like we were getting the best of both worlds.

It worked, at least on the surface, until it slowly became clear that what looked like efficiency in a spreadsheet was not necessarily efficiency in lived experience.

After Covid, we shifted back to a Singapore-centred model. While I would not attribute our stronger business performance solely to geography, I did begin to recognise that there were costs in the previous arrangement that we had simply not been fully accounting for.

The Hidden Cost Is Not Money, but Friction

The most obvious cost is time, but the deeper cost is the way the Causeway quietly reshapes how you structure your entire day. If you know that you might be stuck for two hours or even four hours depending on conditions, you begin to pre-emptively compress your schedule in ways that are not always visible on a calendar.

Meetings end earlier than they should, dinners are avoided even when they would be valuable, and conversations that could have continued naturally are cut short not because they have reached their conclusion, but because you are already mentally calculating Woodlands traffic in the background.

That is the leakage.

Business is not fully schedulable. For instance, a one-hour meeting often becomes a working lunch, and what was meant to be a quick catch-up in the office can easily extend into coffee afterwards, because that is where rapport is actually built. Yet I find myself constantly rushing against time because I am trying to beat the jam, and in that state it becomes harder to allow conversations to unfold naturally.

We tried optimising it in various ways, including 5am crossings, including Tuas, including the idea of “beating the jam.” But the reality is that sometimes you win, and sometimes you simply wake up earlier only to sit in a different queue with the same underlying uncertainty still intact.

Why “Hack” Is an Incomplete Frame

The rent differential is real, and so is purchasing power; but so are the costs required to actually access those differences in practice. Some of these costs are visible, such as tolls, fuel, and time, but many others are not as easily captured, including lost flexibility, constrained evenings, foregone spontaneity, and the mental load of constantly planning your life around a border that does not always behave predictably.

The real question is therefore not whether Johor is cheaper, because it clearly is in many respects. It is whether those savings still hold once you properly account for the friction required to realise them in the context of your actual life.

Home vs Cost Centre

Over time, I have come to a fairly simple distinction that helps me make sense of this.

Singapore is home, not just in a sentimental sense alone, but in the practical sense that it is where my commitments, responsibilities, community, and daily life naturally converge. JB, despite being deeply familiar and emotionally significant, functions more as part of our extended family space and history rather than the centre of our everyday existence.

Home is where your life is organised without constant calculation, while a cost centre is where value may be stored or accessed but not where your daily routines, obligations, and decisions are anchored. Confusing the two tends to lead to a kind of optimisation that looks rational on paper but becomes increasingly costly in practice.

The Key Variable: Dependence

The Causeway itself is not the problem. We still cross it regularly, I am in JB at least once a week, my parents continue to enjoy the family home there, with our three dogs and beloved Malayan box turtle. Our ties with folks there, including our relatives, remain strong and active. But the key difference today is that we are no longer dependent on it as part of our daily operating rhythm.

Take for instance, last National Day weekend illustrated this quite clearly. We went to fetch my parents from the villa, only to find traffic into Singapore deteriorating rapidly within a short period of time. Instead of making a forced decision to join the queue back at 10pm, we simply stayed the night and returned the following morning, congestion-free, without stress or disruption.

That is what optionality looks like in practice.

School, Work, and Life Structure

This matters because life is not just about travel time in isolation, but about the structure that surrounds it. In my case, I am still doing my part-time doctorate with evening classes, my daughter studies in Singapore, my work is based here, my community service commitments are here, and my friendships and evening activities are also here. This means that my days are not always predictable in a way that allows for rigid cross-border planning.

Once a border becomes part of your daily critical path, you no longer optimise for average conditions. You are forced to optimise for worst-case scenarios, and that fundamentally changes how you live even on days when nothing goes wrong.

Not a Rejection, but a Reframing

None of this is meant to suggest that the model described in the article is wrong. For remote workers, retirees, or individuals without school-going children in Singapore, the trade-offs can look very different, and the savings may very well justify the friction involved.

My point is simply narrower, which is that headline savings are not the same as net savings until you properly account for the friction required to realise them in the context of your actual life.

In economics, arbitrage only exists after transaction costs, and cross-border living is no different in that respect.

Closing Thought

JB is cheaper, but Singapore is home. For me it will always remain so.

We still cross the Causeway, but we no longer organise our lives around the assumption that we must cross it at specific times or under specific conditions. That distinction may not appear in a rent comparison or a spreadsheet, but it is often where much of the real value actually lies.

So is living across the Causeway really a cost-of-living hack?

Perhaps.

But I would first ask a simpler question:

Are you optimising a cost centre, or are you protecting a home?