finances Archives - Ringgit Oh Ringgit

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finances

20 ^th
June

How You Behave With Money, According to Your Personality

Posted by Suraya - 4 Comments

Because money and personality are two topics I love to mesh together.

Your Personality, Using the Big Five Personality Traits

Before we go on, we have to spend some time talking about personalities – what is its definition? In comes behavioural science.

The book Me, Myself, and Us: The Science of Personality and the Art of Well-Being by Professor Brian R. Little gave me some great info about the categorisation of personalities, so I’m going to use that. There are many ways to test personality types, including the popular Myers-Briggs model, but Prof Little said the one I’m about to share is the most peer-approved one.

Note: It’s important to remember that for most people, it’s never as clear-cut as A or B (ie, introvert or extrovert). It’s more like a spectrum. Not only we can have qualities of both, we can adjust it to the situation as well.

The Big Five Personality Traits which can be used to explain the spectrum of our personalities are:

09 ^th
March

4 Things Guys Can Do For Women

Posted by Suraya - 5 Comments

I don’t shout out this fact often, but I used to work at an international women’s rights organisation. I can answer most questions you have about women’s human rights, or at least point you in the right direction.

Personal activism is important to me, and I try to implement the lessons I learned during working in NGOs in this blog, in a way that is non-discriminatory to all. I hope that showed through.

If you haven’t noticed, the subject I am most passionate about is financial literacy. In this post I want to invite you to do some personal activism to help the gender that tends to be both overworked and underpaid.

Women, in general, earn less than men, retire/stop working earlier than men, and has a longer retirement period to worry about (longer life expectancy). This post is written for the male reader in mind, but I invite everyone to do their part.

Here are 4 things guys can do for women in their lives.

#1 Talk to her about investing

17 ^th
November

How I Will Be Managing My Money During Trump Presidency

Posted by Suraya - 6 Comments

Like many people around the world, I’m disappointed by Trump’s win in the U.S. elections. Personal reasons aside, what’s done is done. But as it stands, the ripple effect of Trump’s presidency will be felt worldwide, even for us Malaysians who literally live halfway across the world.

My personal opinion is that Trump’s selfish ~~America-first~~ privileged white people-first economic plan won’t work, and even if it did, it would be to the expense of the rest of us global citizens. A group of 370 economists – including not one, but eight Nobel-prize winners think that his plan is crap, too.

Still. If we can’t change his plan, we can still plan around it, until a better U.S. president comes along. This is how I plan to manage my money during Trump presidency for the next four years. I divided this post into three aspects of money management: spending, investing and earning money.

20 ^th
September

Must-Have Financial Tools to Make Freelancing in Malaysia Easier

Posted by Suraya - 21 Comments

Freelancing in Malaysia is not hard, but I think there is a steep learning curve when it comes to managing finances. Based on the conversations I’ve had, many freelancers in Malaysia have a ‘whatever works’ system. This leads to many undesirable side-effects, like:

Losing money to ridiculous fees
Lack of protection and recourse for clients who don’t pay
Indirect loss of income due to perceived lack of professionalism image

It’s hard to write about the complete range of tools that is needed for every freelancer in Malaysia. Some of you are freelance writers, freelance graphic designers, freelance artists. Some of you may freelance with companies like Uber, part-time as insurance/unit trust agents, do promoter-type work for events, or even MLM-type ‘business opportunities’.

For the purpose of this article, I’m going to focus on the must-have financial tools for online-based freelancing jobs, but the tools can be handy for anyone freelancing in Malaysia.

25 ^th
July

Hack: How to Maximise Cashback Credit Cards

Posted by Suraya - 12 Comments

How to Combine Credit Cards with Other Cashback Hacks

27 ^th
March

All my hutang, which ones I’ve paid off, and future debt plans

Posted by Suraya - 12 Comments

In this day and age, it’s pretty hard to avoid being in any kind of debt (hutang). This is my debt history.

13 ^th
January

RM10,000 in: 6 reasons why I invest in Bitcoins

Posted by Suraya - 23 Comments

Today, I reached a milestone! RM10,000 in Bitcoins. This is the second investment I made after ASB (aka genetic lottery due to being technically Malay) that I hold more than RM10k in one investment vehicle.

Update March 2016: I’m now RM15k in.

In a previous post, I wrote about the 4 things I learned about buying Bitcoins in Malaysia.

Related: Bitcoin guide for Malaysians

Today I’m going to talk about why I personally invest in it.