may ask why are you serving c/c when you have 100k cash?

actually your lifestyle seems quite happy already.
considering the "wants" (leisure,gym,car,phone) quite a lot while the "needs" (rent, insurance, food) quite little. did your try to review your budgeting previously to come up with this list?

300 for credit card and 800 for leisure are mostly allocated for drinking, weekend outings, shopping, dates. Yeah I can certainly pay using cash/debit card. But paying by card (with a good track record) would be good for loan applications in the future? Do correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm working in a small town in Pahang, so food and accommodation is pretty cheap here. Certainly not compromising on needs.

Still targeting to achieve a take home pay of 10k a month before I turn 30. With 100k cash, I'm weighing my options to either invest it or save it.

Credit card is a payment mode...

Once you put in "Credit Card" in expenditure, people assume you are paying back credit card overdue or something

To add on, why do you just use 300 on credit card only? Fuel, insurance, gym, food, phone, leisure all can be paid by CC and get cashback..

Typically I can get 1k+ on cashback per year

Any other debts other than the assets you mentioned here?

100k cash at this age sounds good but putting in FD is definitely not gonna work for you in the long run because you will get eaten up by inflation. looking at the amount of insurance, as we dont have the coverage details, but the feeling is that you may be under insured. any plans to buy house? just wondering because it will affect the planning.

Oh sorry my bad. I’m using HSBC credit card. Wow okay I think mine is the one they give points for every ringgit you spend it something similar. Looks like I need to find out how to revert it to cashback instead. Thank you

No other debts other than my current ride. 4 more years of servicing to go. Not married either. The insurance plan that I’ve bought includes a coverage of 1mil of medical fees per annum. Am I still under insured?

I do plan to buy a house, but they’ll take up 2-3k of my monthly salary. Renting out will be a hassle. A supposed asset which doesn’t generate income becomes a liability, no? But what do I know, I’m just a newbie here

hey guys currently my family is having various debts

1. housing loan 1 - 1.3k per month (about 130k left)
2. housing loan 2 - 20k owing to developer to collect keys for the house, currently paying installment of 1.6k per month
2. overdraft - 50k
3. credit card - 18k

may I know how should i clear the debts? all debts belong to my parents and they have 0 income at the moment.

My only advice to them is to sell the current house which worth around 1m and shift to a cheaper place to clear all debts but they refuse to listen and continue to live month to month depending on me and my siblings.

my nett take home is only 5.5k and due to paying all debts i do not have any savings. lets assume my parents do not want to sell the house, what else can i do? thinking of getting personal loan to pay off 20k to get my house key and then try to rent it out first (currently in a law suit suing developer hence not planning to sell yet)

This post has been edited by Wazzzap: Apr 12 2019, 12:32 AM

As we dont have the details , 1mil of medical coverage p.a. is definitely sufficient for now. Since you dont have dependent, not sure whether you have CI coverage in place, and even though PA coverage is a good thing to have but not a must.

Since you are going to buy a house, and since you are helping your dad to start paying the house, you may already eat into the Rm3k savings. This is not counted the car loan if you want to get a new car.

If you want to get a housing loan in the future, will you have the enough cash flow to pay for the mortage?

Then whether your expenses that you listed factored in vacation, payment to parents? any annual payment kind of expenses like road tax, car insurance, professional membership if any, entertainment, donation, gifts, wedding ang pow etc. Many ppl may lost sight of these kind of expenses when they look at their monthly expenses.

After you know the whole year expenses, suggest to keep at least 6 months emergency fund aside without investing it away. Then look at whether you need to have any big spending in the next 3 years, like any further education, downpayment for house / car if any etc. Say if you 6 months emergency fund is RM22.2k (based on the info you provide and not sure it is comprehensive enough), and let say you wanna budget RM30k for car downpayment, RM50k for house downpayment, then your RM100k cant be invested at all as these are for emergency and for near future use.

As we dont have your full info as to what is your existing assets (any investment perhaps? or cash in bank or elsewhere etc), perhaps some general ideas:

- it is a good thing for you to ask them to sell the current house for cashflow but you might not get a good rate due to property market is not so good now. Since you dont get that option, you might want to consider why to take or NOT to take a personal loan:

a) which effective interest rate of your housing loan, overdraft and credit card is higher? credit card is usually at 18%p.a., not sure bout overdraft and housing loan is usually about <5%p.a. May not be a good idea but whether your parents or you or your siblings can withdraw the EPF money instead to pay for the RM20k? Why i say it is not a good idea is because you are losing the 6%p.a. interest in EPF should you do that (assuming they continue to give 6%p.a). In that case, if a personal loan is 5.5%p.a., you might not lose as much as the EPF if you use personal loan to pay the RM20k instead, but I personally feel that having more debts will cause you deeper into financial trouble since you already have so much debt with your limited income.

Hi all,

Wanted to get some advice and views with regards to setting up an Emergency Fund. I've done some calculations on my monthly expenses and have managed to save about 6 months of expenses aside.

My question is where should I put this fund? I have a few options:
1. ASB
2. M2U Savers (roughly about 2%)
3. FD
4. High Interest SA (OCBC Booster or UOB Stash)

I don't want to dump everything in ASB that's why I'm thinking of spreading out where I put the emergency fund. Any advise what would be the best option?

Also, should I slowly increase the fund to 12 months?

Personally I like using spreadsheet to help me manage my finance. Because I felt much in control than using financial app.



Heres how I manage my finance:
*obviously the data isn't real.


After looking at this spreadsheet, I will put aside the overall balance to my investment portfolio. If I felt like I want to save more, I will put away Self Reward and some from Groceries to my investment portfolio.

Normally, I can save more than overall balance. But when theres a time I need to send my car for service, renew my license/passport, I will add the amount to Others.

Addition refers to Additional Income (Teaching, Grab, and simply web dev for example).

And as you can see, theres a months sheet. I update all of it .

I will look at this spreadsheet twice (and up to 10 times) a week. To make sure I follow the plan.



This post has been edited by Leo the Lion: May 5 2019, 04:33 PM

U r doing right so far. Continue to park it at ASB, as emergency fund is not for investment, so no point to diversify it. Just max the return with low risk investment which u r currently doing. Better Still, max it to rm200k . With your bumi privilege, don't bother with m2u saver, fd, or high interest SA. These are for non bumi who doesn't have access to ASB. Even non bumi is recommended to use asnb fixed price fund as emergency fund and forget bout the rest like fd or saving account.

If u feel more secure with 12mths, then u may choose to increase it. Depends on the purpose. Some may want to start a business, so they prepare maybe 1 year, 3 years or even 5 years emergency fund. Or some foresee they may get fired and will take time to get another job. So it really depends on individual circumstances. General rule of thumb, 6 mths is the guidance and probably may be good enough if ur job is very stable.

Not to forget what about any big expenditure that u might need in the next few years, like down payment for new car / house / further education / house renovation etc. This should be set aside as well.

This post has been edited by ytan053: May 7 2019, 08:48 PM

If you can find units.....

noticed that you have stashaway at the bottom of your page. How is it like using stashaway?

Nowadays is Extremely difficult to get the units, what to do, for a better return than FD, a lot more hardwork required. and need to spend / waste a lot of time trying to key captcha

You can read my reviews on them. Its under my signature

Hi guys. Kindly look through my expenses.
Totally blew my budget although I hv been spending carefully.

April Expenses Items:-
Housing Loan & maintenances etc 3100
Car (petrol,toll & parking) 470
Food 730
Leisure 140
Phone & Internet 165
Paid some legal fees 1100
Misc healthcare, dental, services etc 245

Total Expenses : 5950
Nett Income : 5000 - 6000

Thnks.

that is why, many said MUST set up & have emergency fund first

The housing loan & maintenance alone more than half your income. Quite dangerous and i feel its quite hard to sustain this way. Even squeeze here and there the house expenses is still too high.

Hi!! Thanks for the advise. Really appreciate it