Friday, May 11, 2007

At the expense of reduced future consumption

At times, I ponder over the lifestyle specifically the expense decisions that people take. In a country with such dismal transportation system that forces owning a vehicle mandatory to continue to make ends meet, one with such poor purchasing power and high cost of living; it has always bewildered me when I examine the lifestyles people had chosen.

Hire purchase loans especially for cars are now extended up till 9 years of repayment which was unheard of, a few years back. This had practically enlarged the market of buyers with such credit availability to the same group of people who was once thought to be ineligible to afford purchasing the car. As such, people are now pledging years of unearned future income to finance such purchases. This has not yet taken into account, which is more likely than not, the depreciation of the car will be faster than the repayments made. And as a result of that, one will eventually face the conundrum of having to pay more money in order to sell the car.

A manager in the company I'm working for once said, "I like to buy growth, not dead items" whilst discussing luxury watches with another manager. It is quite apparent that he detest money spent on expensive but depreciating items.

Two quotes from Kiyosaki are simple yet profound, which define wealth as "The number of days you can survive forward if you stop working todayā€¯ and "You are rich if your passive income is more than your expenses".

Of course, one has to pamper themselves once a while within reasonable means, both to keep up the sanity in chasing the rat race as well as to actually convert and consume the wealth that is created which otherwise would just remain as nothing but a numerical figure.

I had chanced upon the phrase "at the expense of reduced future consumption" from an article that I read somewhere, and thought, how aptly that summarizes it all.

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Go back to your home branch

This occurred about a week back. It's bemusing to got to know that one can only withdraw a maximum of RM 10k from a Savings that was opened at another branch. And another similar rule applies for FD. One can only withdraw FDs which are RM20k and above from the home branch which the FD account is opened at. And if that's not annoying enough, they (bank employees from another branch) need to wait for the applicant's signature to be faxed over from the home branch before the transaction can be processed. That will take around 15-30 minutes.

Sometimes I can't help but wonder why is the state of our banking system is so limited. The large network of branches everywhere is practically useless given such limitations and policies applied. Customers should not be geographically limited. They should be able to perform any type of transaction without limits at any branch.