Malaysia Money Matters

Yet another "stumbled upon" development last weekend after going to the morning market & breakfast. Went in to have a look and spent quite a lot of time there because it seemed like quite an interesting project. Executive summary (tl:dr version upfront) - I reckon it is a Good Deal . BUY for own stay, it will be a nice place to live. Buy to flip also can. Rental may be so-so, this place looks like it will be an owner-occupied type of condo. So here are the reasons why I quite like it: Price wise - not bad, works out to be about RM600 per square foot Option of a dual key unit AND if you want, you can convert it to a single with more combined square footage Huge sports centre as part of the deal for the land - the developer has to build it for DBKL, so there is that whole "healthy lifestyle" thing going for it Facilities are extensive - sales lady kept going on and on about it, I was like, yeah yeah - we've lived in fairly high end condos before ba...

Over the past few years, with the rapid spread of social media in Malaysia - there has been an exuberance of opinions especially from the chattering classes. The freedom of expression offered by blogs, Facebook, Twitter and so on was seized upon with glee by Malaysians who have long felt that the officially sanctioned opinion was the only voice of the media. Therefore, the democratization of opinion grew at an unprecedented pace. However, such freedom also comes at a price. Most people are sadly unable to discern critically which information is true, false, partly both and how significant it may be. At a benign stage, it is merely stuff like urban myths and hoaxes but it can quickly turn malignant if irresponsible people and groups purposely create pictures and articles as propaganda. Sometimes it is organised and sometimes, it can be just a loner trying to get some attention - the validation comes from the number of likes and shares on social media. Unfortunately, as this ma...

As part of a "mini" budget - the Government will fund a 24-month mortgage subsidy of RM200 per month (RM4,800 in total) for young couples in their first home. The program is managed through Bank Simpanan Nasional. Married couples must be below 40 years old and have a household income below 10k per month. The allocation is for 200,000 couples - works out to be almost a billion to be disbursed over 2 years. To me - this is a good bottoms-up pump priming of the economy because it is directly funding discretionary spend that keeps money moving, thus creating wealth. The only problem is that it can create somewhat of a subsidy mentality but with a relative short period of 2 years, it may not be so bad. It would definitely mean a lot for the lower income group because it is an extra RM200 in their pocket a month - imagine, if their household income is 3k a month, that's a 6.7% increase in cash to spend.