Malaysia Money Matters

After the recent launch of the Sunway BRT line, there will be several more BRT lines coming up - they are cheaper and faster to build as they utilise existing roads. So far I have only used the BRT in Bangkok - they only have 1 line so far and it has been running for some time now. Wonder why they haven't continued with more though? I guess there are certain challenges with Bangkok with the road width in the more densely populated areas, there isn't much leeway for a BRT line to take up more road space because the original road is fairly narrow as BKK is a very old city. Anyway, looking at the BRT plan for KL, it looks interesting - the only areas it doesn't seem to cover are the affluent neighbourhoods of Damansara Heights, Bangsar and Mont'Kiara. Also, looks like the Government is making the hard decision to take up 2 lanes on the MRR2 from Melawati to Jln Ampang - this stretch is jammed in the morning and will be worse with only 2 lanes for traffic instead of...

I remember way back when I first started work and I asked my cousin sister as a guide, how much should one pay for a house or a car based on annual salary? She said 10 times but you know, bless her, she's a bit of a bimbo when it comes to money since she's always had loads of it! Hahaha Anyway, being a bit free the other day, I decided to do a bit of number crunching based on my ahem "insider banking" knowledge (kidding) to work out for myself what is an easy benchmark to decide how much you should pay for a house or a car. The calculation model is very simple, using the maximum 33% of net salary as the repayment amount to determine the maximum eligible loan, then apply an assumed 90% loan to get to the house / car price amount. I also imputed the tax depending on the income levels because for lower income, the difference between your gross and net pay is relatively low with the bulk being caused by EPF's 11% but for higher income folks, the effective tax ...