Your parents are right.
No matter how much we may want to deny it, there *are* bad people in this world. People who don’t think twice about taking your money from you through illegal and unethical means. They do it easily, without guilt or remorse.
This article is a compilation of anecdotes by real people, who were scammed or almost got scammed. Thank you to all who contributed.
What does Mr-Stingy, Dividend Magic, KC Lau, Blackbelt Millionaire and myself have in common? Aside from the fact that we all maintain websites with personal finance content, that is.
All of us do P2P financing as one of our investments. We lend money to companies.
In particular, and most strikingly, all of us chose Funding Societies Malaysia as the P2P financing platform of choice (note: referral code. You get RM50, I get RM50).
(scroll down if you just want to read the interview with Kah Meng)
When Funding Societies Malaysia contacted me for a collaboration opportunity, I was excited. I was already an existing user, with RM10,000 in my account.
My dashboardOn 12 January 2019, I attended an investment event organised by multi-award winning Kenanga Group. The name intrigued me right from the start – you don’t come across something like Market Outlook Symposium 2019: Smart Investing or Dare Betting? every day. Held from 9am-2.30pm, the event packed in five speakers (and a lunch break). You can check the agenda of the day and speakers’ profiles here.
I had fun live-tweeting the whole event. Click on the Twitter thread below to read 50+ tweets giving play-by-play account of each speaker’s presentation. Among others, you’ll find stock picks by Kenanga Investment Bank’s Head of Research, a warrants trading tool (that may help you get double-digit ROIs), what to do with your money during bear markets and more.
I’m seated and ready to live-tweet #KenangaGroup‘s #MarketSymposium2019 event, starting soon! Follow and RT this thread for investment outlook in 2019 pic.twitter.com/KcvRakWrce
— Suraya Zainudin (@surayaror) January 12, 2019
Here are some things I learned from the event. Some commentaries are not specific to the event itself, but an overview of the general investment events scene in Malaysia. This article is sponsored by Kenanga, but all opinions are mine.
According to the Department of Statistics Malaysia, the T20 in this country received 46.2% of overall income share in 2016, while the M40 and B40 received 37.4% and 16.4% respectively.
Looking at the statistics, you can’t deny that rich Malaysians must know something that the rest of us don’t. I mean, the top 20% can’t have gotten almost half of all the income in Malaysia by accident.
I am greatly fascinated by the money mindset that the rich have. Not their lifestyle, mind you – looking rich is not the same as being rich – but their mindset: what they learned from their parents (if they were born rich) or from life experiences (if they worked hard to get there).
Here are some things that I’ve learned about rich Malaysians.
I HOPE ONE OF YOU ROR READERS WILL WIN THE RM5000 CASH PRIZE!!!
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In conjunction with World Savings Day, VISA and AKPK are doing a financial literacy initiative called Treat Your Money Right.
You know how content from insurance/takaful companies all kind of say the same things? “Protect yourself and your family in case anything happens”, “Life is unexpected, be prepared”, “Make sure your loved ones are taken care of”?
Yeah, they’re repetitive. And boring. Important stuff, sure, but boring.
So when I got the opportunity to interview Great Eastern Takaful’s CEO, Shahrul Azlan Shahriman, I told them I wanted more meat if we proceed with a paid collaboration to promote their newest takaful product, i-Gr8 Harapan. I told them I don’t do pure ‘promotion’ without interesting content about their new takaful product and the takaful industry in general.
Surprisingly, this jual mahal approach paid off. They approved all of my questions. Here they are, for your reading pleasure.
When Perbadanan Insurans Deposit Malaysia – PIDM for short – contacted me about doing a paid collaboration, I was confused. Unlike other sponsored post inquiries I get, PIDM has no products or services to sell. If anything, their services are (1) free and (2) automatic.
Then they told me their reasons. They’re to:
So apparently – and I didn’t know about this before – there are people out there who scam your family and friends because they don’t know about PIDM?? That is horrible! And this is why PIDM wants to tell the public who they are and what they do!
So I said yes, and together we created this plain-English article about what PIDM does.
According to a website report, Ringgit Oh Ringgit blog is A- grade, or ‘very good’. I have As for SEO, Usability, Social and Security aspects. Only Performance aspect is not great, but that’s because my page size is big (due to the ads).
At the time of writing, Ringgit Oh Ringgit has been around for 2.5 years, more or less. Figuring out how to create a blog in the beginning was hard; I just wanted to write shit, and I didn’t know there are many other aspects I have to know and consider.
As I was adamant to generate income from this hobby, I had no choice but to learn as I go along. Here are some things I wish I knew earlier. This article is for you fellow bloggers and companies doing content marketing as a lead generation strategy.
EDIT: This is a sponsored post for BBazaar Malaysia, but they have since exited the Malaysian market. Took out all their links, but the content itself is evergreen
Choosing the best credit card in Malaysia is like choosing dates on Tinder. Sometimes, you accidentally ignore the good cards (fast left swipes). Sometimes, the cards themselves beg for your attention (superlikes). And sometimes, the cards you want are not available to you (they didn’t swipe right for you..).
It can be a frustrating search process. You thought you have a lot of choices, but why is none of them suitable? But eventually you’ll find that perfect match for you, and you’ll never imagine life without them. Amirite, Tinder couples reading this?
Tinder analogy aside, credit cards really are great financial tools. I use them to earn points, shop (online and offline), make instalments on larger purchases and top up e-wallets (usually for the discounts).
If you can practice habits that make you a responsible card user – like paying off all bills in full at the end of the month and not treating it as ‘free money’ – I’d recommend you to get one. They can help you build a good DSR score, too – good if you’re planning to buy a house in the future.
Here are some lesser-known tips I can offer you.
As someone who keeps gold and regularly checks the price, I thought I’d cover the gold price movement in the last decade. Here’s what happened to gold prices between 2008 until mid-2018. Think of this article as an explanation of the 10-year historical gold price chart below.
The price of gold from 2008-2018, per kilo (for some reason can’t change setting to grams)For the benefit of this article, I’ll use price of gold per gram, not per kilo. Most people track the price that way anyway (unless they’re from the US, in which case they use ounces).
