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Abstract

A common narrative among Filipino migrant domestic workers in
Singapore and Hong Kong is that their work abroad is to guarantee a
better future for their families. Migrant women frequently extend
their temporary contracts, sometimes over decades, as they seek to
realize numerous life projects, such as remitting money for their chil-
dren’s education, building a family house, or responding to medical
or climate-related crises. Yet their contracts can only be extended
until retirement age, after which they must return to their countries
of origin. This paper focuses on migrant women approaching this
critical juncture as they begin to shift their focus inwards, towards
themselves, in the face of precarious futures with limited state-based
forms of social protection and uncertainties around kinship care in
later life. As a consequence, domestic workers increasingly enroll in
courses on ‘financial literacy’ to prepare for their retirement. Such
courses are led by an array of actors from NGOs and co-operatives
to state agencies, private multinationals, and motivational speakers.
They generate new financialized aspirations among migrant women
which revolve around self-responsibility for success and security in
later life. This cultivation of a self-oriented and ‘purpose-driven’
ethos also generates new (inter)dependencies, risks, and exclusions
in migrant women’s lives. I further examine how such financialized
modes of thinking exist alongside, and in tension with alternative im-
aginaries around social protection and how to live a good and mean-
ingful present and future life.