Best Time To Deposit Money on Li Chun 2019. Is The Queue Worth It?

Li Chun Starts On 4th February 2019

Li Chun 2019 falls on the 4th of February this year.

In Singapore, we have a culture of queueing to deposit money on Li Chun, which is perfectly in-line with Singaporeans’ favourite past time of queuing

It is believed that by depositing money during a certain auspicious hour, subject to your Zodiac, one will get to enjoy good fortune for the rest of the year.

Here’s the best time to deposit money this year!

TL;DR – Best time to deposit money for each zodiac

• The timeslots highlighted in Orange indicates the best time to deposit money.
• The timeslots in Pink indicates a good time to deposit money.
• Li Chun stretches from 11am on 4 February 2019 to 11am on 5 February 2019, hence, if you need the notes deposit machine, do avoid this timing.

How much is an hour of your time worth?

It is a common sight to see Singaporeans queuing at the cash deposit machines hoping to make it in time to deposit some cash during their auspicious hours.

My personal experience in the past involves up to one and a half hours of queuing.

Note: I’m not really the most superstitious guy around, but it was during office hours with my colleagues. Hence, I’m cool with it. Anything to shave a few hours off work!

Taking a step back, it will be good to pay extra attention to how much is one hour of our time worth to see if it makes sense to queue for the annual Li Chun Cash Deposit Movement.

Assuming an individual:

• Work 9 hours a day from 9am to 6pm.
  Sleeps 7 hours a day (healthy amount of sleep according to science)
  
• Willing to queue behind 15 people, with an estimated queue time of 1 hour 4 mins for a $100 gift certificate.
  
• Willing to pay up to $50 to sort out this mess of arranging these screws into their respecting category.
  
• Willing to pay $50 for cab fare to prevent waiting for a bus that is arriving in 2 hours.
• Earns the median Singaporean salary of about $3,490.
• Willing to work through Chinese New Year with 100% overtime pay.

With the above, your one hour of spare time will be worth $55.

Which means that for every hour you spend queuing, the opportunity cost is $55.

Hacks to avoid the queue this Li Chun

Given the advancement in technology, there are definitely ways we can hack around the process and make us queue lesser.

Improving the current Li Chun process with E-wallets

Our current procedure involves:

• Queuing at the ATM
• Taking money out of our physical wallet
• Depositing it into the bank account

This process, however, results in long queues at the cash deposit machines and time wastage while queuing:

With the advancement in technology, and without compromising on the actual mechanism on how money travels:

• Transfer some money into your E-wallet, eg. PayLah
• Transfer money from E-wallet back to your bank account
• All in the comfort of your home.

Planning the ATM to go to which has the least crowd

Upon researching the auspicious hours for all the Zodiacs, we managed to recognise some of the peak hours where we believe most people will want to be depositing their money.

Do take into account that there is usually a spike in number for babies born in the year of Dragon. Other Zodiac might wish to avoid timings that coincide with the “Huat Time” of those born in the year of Dragon.

We noticed that the most peak hour will be on 4 February 2019 at 1pm to 3pm. Since 4 February 2019 is a Monday and most Singaporeans should be working, depositing money at cash deposit machines away from town will be your best bet.