Link Roundup #77: 10 Things to Know This Week
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. Psychologists uncover new details about how money influences the frequency and intensity of happiness – PsyPost
Does money buy happiness? According to these new studies, ‘income was positively related to happiness frequency but not intensity‘. Translation: money can make you happier more often, but they don’t necessarily make your happiness more intense.
I also like how this article differentiated the two types of leisure: passive leisure activities, such as TV watching and relaxing, and active leisure activities like socializing and practising hobbies. People with higher incomes tend to do more of the latter, which makes them happier more frequently.
2. Four Ways to Keep Working From Home When the Boss Wants You Back – Bloomberg
I bet some of you are enjoying your work-from-home arrangement. If your boss is old-school and planning to bring the workforce back together physically, maybe it’s not a bad idea to find strategies that might convince her/him to keep the work-from-home arrangement.
3. 5 research-backed reasons working from home will stick – World Economic Forum
You may find more statistics in here. For example, did you know that only 13.9% of people reported work from home arrangement to be worse (and less productive)? The rest, or 86.1% reported the same and better experiences and productivity.
4. Why You’re Not Getting Interviews (When You’re Qualified) – Forbes
Employers want to hire quality talent who can help them achieve their vision. People want good jobs and the chance to do meaningful work.
If you are qualified but keep losing out interviews: Are you underselling yourself, using too much jargon in your resume, or not standing out from the crowd?
(Remember: since remote working is getting more and more normalised – you don’t have to limit your job search to Malaysian employers. Definitely ignore the ones offering less than living wage.)
5. Robo Showdown: Investors Are Setting up Multiple Robo-Advisors Just to Watch Them Fight – Money
When faced with multiple, but similar options, some people can spend days, weeks, months just doing the research. And others, well, they turn it into a fun experiment. In the U.S, there are financial bloggers/content creators who set up multiple robo-advisors just to see them battle it out.
In Malaysia, Fiholic is running a similar experiment. He announced in May 2021 that he has deposited RM100 in 6 licenced robo-advisors in Malaysia and will be posting regular updates. As of time of writing, he has posted the first month’s result – click the twitter thread to read.
6. I Make More Money Than My Partner. Am I Subsidizing His Life? – Refinery29
While we are used to the ‘his money is my money’ narrative for the women, the other way around is not true – women still tend to believe in ‘my money is MY money’. And that brings problems and resentment, which is obviously not great for long-term relationships.
The article has a lot of good tips on money management as a couple. I like this part which acknowledges fairness means differently to different people, based on their experiences;
You simply may have different ideas of what is fair. You and your partner are coming into a shared experience from different perspectives. For you, fair might look like an even 50/50 split. For him, it might seem fairer to split up costs based on each of your incomes.
If you’re in a relationship where both of you work and earn money, I highly recommend reading the article. Women earning more money than their partner (or being the primary breadwinners in the household) is not a new phenomenon, so you should know how to talk about money with your partner, in an open and healthy way.
7. Handling Finances as Partners / Couple – Between The Money
On the same topic, here’s a writeup by fellow Malaysian personal finance blogger Between The Money, who admitted to fighting about money with his wife due to different money mindset, and how they’re working on it. He wrote,
When we first started off, we were polar opposites on finances. We just could never see eye to eye when it comes to money. For example: She would expect the guy to pay for everything, whilst my thinking is more towards equal treatment (add in pamper moments here and there).
My only input here is yes I’m all for equal financial contribution, as long as the hours of unpaid care work – housework, childcare and elderly care – is divided equally, too.
8. 7 Ways to Get Unstuck – Inc
I need to get my hands on The Energy of Money book, written by Dr Maria Nemeth. The first point on demonstrating your standards of integrity hooked me in:
As an NYU student, Kalika racked up parking tickets that her parents paid. The Energy of Money helped her realize, “That’s not living in integrity–why am I making them pay for my parking tickets?” Though she wasn’t making much money at the time, she paid them back little by little with each paycheck.
“Though they said I didn’t need to, paying them back was important to me,” Kalika recalled. “And once I did, something clicked inside of me. Like I was aligned; I felt like a rocket that could go anywhere and accomplish anything.”
What a wonderful example of taking ownership of one’s own financial journey. I can’t explain it, but repaying PTPTN has the same energy.
9. How I Lowered My Phone Bill by 41% – from RM 68 to RM 40 as I WFH – Balkoni Hijau
I, too, noticed that many telco companies have started offering cheaper phone plans. Click the article to read how Helmi lowered his phone bill by 41%, and also for the handy table, comparing six under-RM50 plans:
- Digi Postpaid 40
- Digi Prepaid 30
- Hotlink Prepaid 3Mbps
- Hotlink Postpaid 40
- Celcom Postpaid Xpax Lite
- Yoodo Prepaid 35
10. TheCoffeeBreak.co
Do you doomscroll because you’re worried of missing important news updates? So do I! Subscribe to TheCoffeeBreak.co for condense, must-know news updates.
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That’s it for this round, catch you next time! Want to submit a link you thought was great? Reach out to me on FB or Twitter.
To read past link roundups, please click here.
Thanks for quoting Balkoni Hijau Suraya 🙂
My pleasure Helmi 🙂 Love your articles!
Hi Suraya,
Not sure if you have heard of it or feature it in your blog, but I love Morning Brew and has been subscribing to their daily emails for the past 2 years. A quick 2 minute email to get up to date with current issues. Will say it’s a bit US centric but still very much worth subscribing 🙂
I love morningbrew! That’s worth a subscribe for sure 🙂 But this one is from Malaysia, so #sapotlokal