Welcome to the What’s In My Bag: Malaysia Personal Finance Content Creators Edition!
For International Women’s Day on 8 March 2020, I thought it would be fun to play around with the theme, #EachforEqual, and ask my fellow personal finance content creators about something that enables their personal and work lives: the contents of their bags.
To put simply, what do we carry around with us to get. shit. done?
Accelerate your personal finance knowledge with this regular feature on Ringgit Oh Ringgit – the Link Roundup! I promise you’ll find these 10 links informational 🙂
1. Eligible Malaysians Can Begin Registering For The Malaysians@Work Initiative In April – RinggitPlus
“The initiative, which aims to provide better job opportunities for unemployed Malaysians and to reduce dependency on foreign labour, is a stimulus package conceived to help create up to 350,000 jobs over the next five years.
“Don’t be mistaken that we will only create 350,000 jobs. This is only for the Malaysians@Work programme. It will be in addition to the one million jobs to be created by the private sector,” Guan Eng further clarified.”
The programme has four components to it:
I hope this initiative helps you, I really do.
Some time ago I wrote about how I got bored one day and decided to check out (and write about) the Bank Negara Malaysia website.
I got bored again, so here’s an article about me clicking around Securities Commission Malaysia website pulak.
(Huh, this can be an ongoing series. I can write about other financial institutions’ websites, why not)
Similar disclaimer here. None of the screenshot-ed images below are mine, they’re taken from the website. Securities Commissions Malaysia team reading this, please don’t sue me *laughs nervously*
Hey, you. You want to achieve financial freedom in Malaysia, but don’t know how. You may not even know what that entails. Financial freedom is like one of those meaningless phrases, like ‘paradigm shift’.
Let me help.
Good employers exist. Before we even start this article, I just want to tell you that despite all the workplace-related horror stories you read on social media, good and caring employers exist. They just get overshadowed by all the bad ones.
And here’s the thing – they *want* to attract you, a talented professional, to work with them.
This article serves two purposes:
Accelerate your personal finance knowledge with this regular feature on Ringgit Oh Ringgit – the Link Roundup! I promise you’ll find these 10 links informational 🙂
1. What Happens To Your Brain And Body When You’re Stressed About Money – Huffington Post
When you’re stressed about money,
This is one of those ‘pick your hard’ moments. It’s hard – damn freaking hard – to force yourself to earn more money so you don’t get stressed about it anymore. But you can argue that the alternative – STAYING in the current situation without doing anything about it – is also just as hard, perhaps even harder.
The article suggests credit counselling, attending theraphy and seeking healthy coping mechanisms to reduce stress. Do that, you owe that to yourself, don’t give up. I’m rooting for you.
Did you know you can buy a business in Malaysia? Some of you may already know this, but I didn’t up until my mid-20s, so here I am putting that fact out there.
If you’ve always wanted to test your entrepreneurial side, you can buy a business from any of the options listed below, instead of starting one from scratch. Kind of like the same idea as buying clothes off the rack rather than sewing it yourself. Might need alterations, but it’s ready-to-wear.
What type of business, you ask? Oh dudettes. So many types. Anything you can think of. We’re talking:
On 1 and 2 February 2020, I self-organised not one, but FOUR money management workshops in one weekend. Tiring? Yeah. Fulfilling AND profitable? HELL YEAH.
In this article, I’d like to share with you the exact steps I used to plan and execute the workshops, from ideation to execution. I did almost everything myself, with the help of various online tools and platforms.
There are seven steps involved. Use this as a guide if you’re planning to organise your own workshops, in any niche, to earn as side income.
I had a good start to the year, if I do say so myself! There were definitely more ups than downs in January 2020, I’m feeling very grateful 🙂
In terms of expenses, I guess not breaking RM6k is a minor win, given all my ongoing projects – both business and personal. I think I struggled a bit with focusing, reducing anxiety and ‘switching off’ (because there were too many things going on!) and while my coping mechanism could be better, it’s not horrible either.
For example, here’s an unnecessary cause of stress: feeling guilty that I enjoy being distracted with work *while* I’m exercising, because it makes the time go faster. It feels like cheating somehow. I actually felt better after giving myself permission to just do it, because at least some exercise is better than no exercise right? Small matter, but there you go.
Here’s another unnecesary cause of stress: my parents – because they love me so much, and also adat – want a more elaborate wedding procedure than what I would have planned for myself (oh surprise I’m getting married this year). It was hard for me to accept, but I guess it is what it is and above all I want to make them happy. So my solution? I gave them a budget to stick to. Let’s see if that works.
All these, I guess, are examples of ‘change what you can, accept what you can’t’ in practice. As much as you want to try and change the situation, sometimes you just can’t, you gotta admit that and be okay with it and move on. Life just don’t hand you everything you want because you ‘want’ it or ‘worked’ for it.
What’s something you don’t particularly like but kind of accepted in life, and try to make the best of? How do you reduce unnecessary stresses? Share with me in the comments section!
Accelerate your personal finance knowledge with this regular feature on Ringgit Oh Ringgit – the Link Roundup! I promise you’ll find these 10 links informational 🙂
1. How to Build a Great Relationship with a Mentor – Harvard Business Review
According to the article:
The research on the power of mentorship is pretty clear: People with mentors perform better, advance in their careers faster, and even experience more work-life satisfaction. And mentors benefit, too. After all, “to teach is to learn twice.”
But somehow, our culture kind of promotes animosity between different age groups? The whole #OKBoomer thing made it worse (I understand why it trended; its just, does it do more good or does it do more harm? That’s the question).
In 2020, I do want to unlearn negative stereotypes I had of older folks. We Millennials and Gen Z talk big of being inclusive, so let’s walk the talk. Ageism is a form of discrimination as well.
