Interloper View

Saving money can only be achieved if it is part of the family culture. It all started with my parents, they instilled the sense of frugality to me and also my children. I am lucky that my wife shares similar values as my parents and myself. Being frugal doesn't mean never ever splurging and rewarding ourselves, it is fine to spend extra occasionally. What is important is the frequency of doing that and what we do the rest of the time. Developing a culture takes time; in my case a lifetime. I learned a lot from observing my parents: When possible, repair instead of buying a replacement. Cook at home instead of eating out. When eating out look for places that are less expensive. They often keep leftovers for lunch or breakfast. Eat together during dinner in order to reduce leftovers. Buy only what is needed. Use recycled items whenever possible. My mother used to sew our clothes (not so much anymore since we can get some inexpensive clothes in t

The first time I heard of stock option was when I opened an account with a discount broker, however, I kept away from it because of the high risk stated in the disclosure form more than ten years ago. I decided to learn more about stock options within the last six months, reading articles, watching YouTube videos and also listening to podcast on the subject. I was surprised to see the amount of information and sources on this topic. The trading strategies such as Iron Condor, Iron Butterfly, Butterfly Spread seems too complicated for me. After reading through all the material, I decided to focus on the following basics: Options can be bought and sold. Options have a strike price, premium and expiration. Selling a call option means we may have an obligation to sell shares at the strike price (even when the market price is higher that the strike price). Buying a call option will allow us to get the shares at the strike price if the price of the underlying share

This is a follow up from part 1 , additional tricks of saving money. Discounts Some discounts are not obvious because they are not openly publicized. So the first thing to do is to ask whether the store is running any promotions. I do not memorize all the offers provided by my credit card and often miss them - the habit of asking about promotion helps in reducing the times I miss such promotions. Some promotions that are still available at the point of my writing are: Starbucks will give a RM2 discount if you use your own Starbucks Tumbler or mug. I am not sure if they will offer the same discount if you use a non-Starbucks mug. McDonald’s will give you a free frozen coke if you spend more than RM10 and pay with your credit card. McDonald’s will also give a free item (sometimes fries, other times apple pie) if you spend more than RM20 in the drive through and have a McDonald’s VIP sticker. Beyond Vege provide 15% discount off the total bill for paying bil

The following are some of the tricks I learned over the years and thought of sharing them here. Cashback Cards A few years back, I looked my credit card and how I used it. I found that it was better to get cash back than to accumulate points. This was what I concluded: Most credit card points expire. Often the points will expire before I could accumulate enough to redeem items that I wanted. In many cases, I could not find anything worth redeeming (or at least needed). When I compute the points needed to exchange for cash vouchers, the cash back yield was a better option. This is why I prefer cash back credit cards over other credit cards types of credit cards. I consider the cash back as discounts since I have to spend money to earn the cash back. Other type of cards is useful if it provides items that is otherwise not available. I have earned quite a lot of cash back since I switched over to cash back cards. However, in the last few years, the banks

The banks are cutting back on the benefits of credit cards in Malaysia. These are the ones I know: OCBC Titanium card started with 5% for groceries, food and petrol but reduced it to 1% without limit. However, this year they changed the cash back to 0.1% for all purchases except for online purchases which still gets 1 %. UOB One card followed with by taking off the cap of the maximum cash back available for each month but reduced the cash back for week days to 2% (plus 1% UOBCash for BHPetrol).  Cash back were removed for spending at pharmacies. Breakdown of new cash rebates are as follow: Category Weekday Weekend Cap Note Petrol 2% 5% RM500.00 Additional 2% if pump at BHPetrol with cap of RM 400/- Cinema (GSC only) 2% 5% Groceries 1% 2% RM1,000.00 Aeon Big, Tesco, Cold Storage, Jaya Grocer and Giant Telecommunication 1% 2% RM300.00 Maxis, Digi and Celcom Others 0.20% 0.20% I was not able to confirm is there is reduction in UOB$ earned for BHPetrol on weekdays, it loo

The following is a comparison of the various medical cards in Malaysia, covering Prudential ING AIA Great Eastern Allianz AXA Affin Life  The comparison is based on a 30 year old male who does not smoke. I am not sure when it was last updated. The website it was linked to no longer exist. The spreadsheet is as here .

My recent accident got me to think about insurance when I found out that my medical card did not cover for the bridge needed to replace the three teeth I lost. We consulted an agent from another insurance company who happen to be a close friend to my parents. According to her, bridge should be covered since it was to restore the function of my mouth before the accident. The other two insurance cover maintains that bridge is considered cosmetic and is therefore not covered. ©  Marissa CC: Attribution-ShareAlike Sadly, it is usually the case when it comes to insurance. We get insurance for the peace of mind that we will be covered when we need it but when we really need to coverage, we are told that we are not covered. I am switching my medical insurance for now. I hope the new policy will provide a better coverage than the one I am switching from. For a comparable premium the lifetime limit of the medical insurance is RM 1 million compared to the old one is only RM 720k. The o

This is from the following article . 1.  "Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one." 2.  "It's fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure." 3.  "Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose." 4.  "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction." 5.  "Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs." 6.  "I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot." 7.  "I'm a big believer that as much as possible, and there's obviously political limitations, freedom of migration is a good thing." 8.  "If you can't make i

With the current financial crisis happening globally, the stock market has dropped significantly.  It is true that some of the shares have recovered but majority have not. Now that a lot of people are trying to find safe haven for whatever funds they have left, it may be a time to buy shares. I used to subscribe to the notion of buy and hold but that has caused me to lose a significant amount of funds. Maybe, investment should be a mixture of technical analysis and fundamental analysis. A lot of books and sites have been written on both topics. So the question remains, how do you start. For the U.S. share market a lot of sites provide tools to perform such analysis but in other countries, there isn't as much. So what is the alternative. One of the tools I found that can be obtained for free to help learn / self study technical analysis is chartNexus . You can download and install the tool and it provides a daily update (End Of Day) data for a lot of different countries. Th