Honestly speaking, for a long term annual inflation rate, 3.3% to 3.5% is a reasonable figure. We as financial planners do not use even 4% because imagine if we were do calculation for retirement for our clients for a period of 15 to 20 years, the result will be there no matter what the client do, there will never be enough for retirement, ever.

We are talking about long term inflation rate on the main/common basket of food, not just specifically on teh tarik or GST or specific item. Hope this clarifies and helps.

Many Malaysians are not aware of their position and hence didnt plan their future.

When come to retirement planning, you need to use a long term inflation rate because retirement planning is not for 1 to 2 years but for a term of 10 or probably 40 years! There must be a basis for 10% inflation and not just based on gut feel or based on certain product. Who can tell what is the nation wide inflation rate for the past 10 years? There must be solid data and sources to based on.

And to clarify, independent financial planner who do holistic financial planning DO NOT work for a bank, insurance or financial institution. Many people think that financial planner are those with financial institution selling insurance and bank products, that is what the bank portrays their "wealth planner" and insurance companies portray their "insurance agent" as, which is totally misleading. This is also one of the Malaysian problem where they do not understand what does an independent financial planner do and mix them up with those who works with the financial institution.

It is also not easy to achieve consistently 10% ROI p.a. long term, say, continuously for 10 years. U may get 10% consistently for 3 to 5 years, how about for the next 10 to 20 years? We are talking about annualized long term ROI.

It is excellent for you to be able to plan your financial meticulously and grow your NAV at your own. You definitely have certain level of financial knowledge to manage your investment consistently via reivew and maximising your return, especially the part that you are managing your risk very well.

Personal financial is not only about investment. It is also about managing your debt, your retirement planning, investment planning, risk management (like insurance), tax planning, estate planning, children education (if any). Because there is no point you investing in somewhere which the return is lower that the interest rate you are paying for your credit card debts and housing loan.

Cybermaster not only manages investment but risk as well. This is very important because the fact that investing in high risk products can mean risking your money that you might not get back your capital at all. So there is thorough study and research to be done before selecting the proper investment

This picture is without wife's income and expenses, hence may not be comprehensive.

With leftover of RM1k+, you might not be able to pay the loan if the loan came out to more than RM1.4k a month.

The advise is very general because you didnt provide your current assets and liabilities to assess the situation. Even though property maybe a good time to buy now, but your cash flow does nt seems to allow you to buy a house because you dont have enough cash flow to pay the instalment, unless ur loan instalment is less than RM1k a month and you have cleared the debt (unknown amount).

Before you talk about investment, do you have any emergency cash funding in hand for at least around 6 months (which will be at least RM17,520) because there are expenses that you are not aware and didnt disclose which you dont spend every month but occasssionally / once a year - car maintenance, road tax insurance, any gift/donation, membership fee, insurance, entertainment, shopping, grocery, pharmacy etc. Without the checklist, you may miss out a lot of expenses. This is just the beginning. In personal finance, there are many other steps to take care of in the later part.

*It is very good that you have the asb loan, it is already a very good investment. This also shows that you dont mind to go for non-syariah compliant investment.

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.

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.

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

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

MUM has replied you well. For anyone to advise you on what to do with your money, dont u think u r in a better position to decide?

Because we don't have a full pic of your position, we can only throw u questions for you to ponder, think and decide:

1) does this money serve as emergency funding or it's money that u have as spare? I.e. how long / time u can afford not to touch this money?
A) if let say u r gonna make a downpayment for house purchase that costs u rm80k next year , then do u think u will want to invest this money and subject to the market ups and downs? Esp the market is very volatile these days
B) do u have enough emergency money for at least 6 mths of your expenses?

2) if your answer to no.1 is that yes, this is spare money that u can afford to take risk, then whether u have a plan of how much into different types of assets / investments?
A) How do u determine the allocation to each investment without a plan?
B) What is your risk tolerance? Can u take low / medium /high risk and which investments suits u?
C) what is your target return? Double digit? 8%? 5%?

After q2, there are several more questions but I shall stop here. This is to illustrate that if u r serious about your money, u will do some serious step instead of leaving to the forumers to give u idea / advice . How do u decide whether the advice suits you / is correct / harm you?