that google tisp, at one glance, is an april fool's joke. i wonder who's so naive to have fallen for that =_=
anyway, i've decided to update!
i'm sitting at a seattle's coffee house in a small town in ohio, typing away with a tall glass of stella's. just finished some work, therefore this post.
nothing much to update i guess.. except that i'm missing the food and s@lsa back home :P. i'll be back in may, so that's just around 5 more weeks to go!
work is pretty much okay, i'm handling two projects, one on site, and one remotely... and as you can guess, the remote project is back home. i find that it's really tough to keep up with the project back home; what they say is true, out of sight, out of mind. dang. it really takes a lot of effort to keep that project going and to keep to the schedule... trying very hard to meet the deadline coming june..
financially, i'm doing better than the last time i blogged. the decision to take down the financial goal is a good one, less stress :P. i'm at about 93% now, should be about 2 months away from my original goal :)
health wise, still pretty bad, am gaining weight by the pounds! been running and doing some push up, but muscle sore keeps me from doing them daily....
Did you hear about the RM 15 million deal for a company worth about 4.67% that amount? Can't understand the impact of this? Imagine exchanging RM 20 that you have now with RM 1. That's the kind of deal our friendly EPF who manages 23% of what we earn in our lifetime did. I hope this is not like cockroaches, for every 1 you find there's 20 that remains hidden...
As soon as my Account 1 hits 55k, I'm signing up for the mutual fund program thingy. I'll have to research to see whether low-load index funds are included in this program. I don't want to give 7% away (and 1.5% annually henceforth) everytime I buy into it.
Update #1: To be fair, they issued a press release in defense. But where are the facts?
Update #2: Tried looking around in the newly revamped EPF website, but couldn't find any info on the mutual fund program thingy. I can only find the list of appointed fund management institutions in the google cache. Crap now I have to go through them one by one to see if any of them sells index funds.
Gina was right, I have trouble saving my keep. This bad habit of mine stemmed from the champagne tastes on beer budget thingy. Maybe my unusual rise in the ranks has something to do with it. Or maybe I just had this yuppie attitude since university days.. money in, money out.
But anyway, this has to change.
I'm actually starting 2007 with some debt, owing to the overspending in December, around 30% of my monthly budget.
Now, if I can go through January comfortably, that also means that I have an additional 30% to use in subsequent months. And if this is indeed the case, my plan of saving 10% and allocating 20% for the car can start earlier than expected!
Now with a new year, comes resolutions. I came across an insightful series of articles that is based on a book that I've read before - The Richest Man in Babylon.
Reading the posts, I tried to look for my book, but couldn't find it. Sigh, lost another book to dunno who.
What the articles say makes sense - first we have to pay ourselves 10% of our money before we get any chance to spend it. I personally think it made a lot of sense, and although in our case our government makes it compulsary for us to sock away 11% of our salary before we even get to touch it, I think it's best to ignore that bunch of money because we don't really have much control over it.
That aside, the first few steps of my financial renaissance has made its mark.
- I've started using Quicken to track my expenses. - I've made a still-being-finetuned-budget, and consciously try to keep to it.
However, this budget is based on a full figure salary of an average 28 yrs old Malaysian, which means I'm still spending way too much. It would be ideal if I can still do 2 things out of this budget of mine:
i) Save 10% out of it ii) Buy a car
Of course, doing both at the same time right away would be too ambitious, and plain silly. Hence my 2007 financial resolution: to be able to save 10% out of my budget, and to be able to buy a car out of it. I would be the first to admit that it is an audacious ambition, but hey, if it's not tough enough, it is not a resolution. ;-)
I'll repeat again that it's silly to be overly ambitious and be of the mindset that we can change things overnight. The fact is that we can't, no matter how much in control we think we are.
Therefore, what I'll do is this. I will follow and finetune my budget for 3 months, January, February and March. In April I will attempt to modify the budget for a 10% savings BEFORE any of it even sees the daylight. I will do this for another 3 months, April, May, June, by which time I will seriously consider purchasing a car within the limits of this budget of mine, even with the 10% savings imposed. This will seriously limit the choice of cars that I can buy, but then again this is a discussion for some other day.
