Avoid the Private Retirement Schemes (PRS) Funds

The Employees' Provident Fund (EPF) of Malaysia has long been criticised for offering a one sized fits all retirement savings solution for all Malaysians. It has only one fund for all its contributors aged from the 20s to 50s. Everyone gets the same return every year. Ideally, younger contributors should be able to put their… Continue reading Avoid the Private Retirement Schemes (PRS) Funds

Should You Pick Stocks?

The next two layers of the 'asset allocation model' concerns buying and holding individual stocks as part of your strategy to growth your wealth. The risks involved are much higher and concentrated at these levels, so it would be best to only start allocating money to this level, once you have appropriately mastered and allocated… Continue reading Should You Pick Stocks?

Building The Foundation Of Your Retirement Savings

This is going to be a simple post because the idea is pretty straight forward. We may all retire some day. Some aspire to do it as soon as possible (such as those in the the FIRE movement), while others choose to delay it as long as possible since there's pretty much nothing else productive… Continue reading Building The Foundation Of Your Retirement Savings

Why You Should Consider Buying A House

From the perspective of investments, properties have plenty of undesirable traits. It's expensive and typically you will be unable to buy it outright - you pay part of it as downpayment and then borrow the remainder from a bank. When Buying, Set Aside More Than The Downpayment The downpayment can be quite substantial - usually 20% of the purchase price… Continue reading Why You Should Consider Buying A House

Financial Advice For My 25 Year Old Self

Assuming that my 23 year old self had followed a disciplined approach to balance my income and expenses, at 25 years old I should be well into building my emergency savings. Once I have accumulated an emergency savings worth 6 months of expenses, my savings should now go into riskier investments. There will be things… Continue reading Financial Advice For My 25 Year Old Self

Financial Advice For My 23 Year Old Self

My first job as a telecommunications engineer paid about MYR2,300 (~USD600) a month. That's pretty reasonable for an entry level job in Malaysia but boy sometimes it seemed that I could never make any headway with my savings. If only I knew then what I know now about managing personal finances. I didn't really keep… Continue reading Financial Advice For My 23 Year Old Self