None of us have the ability to foresee the future or predict the hurdles which lie ahead of us. This makes building an emergency fund a financial priority. Building an emergency fund is healthy for your financial well being, since you are rarely given advance notice of a setback or an accident which will keep you out of work for an extended period. It is also a safety net that can save you from bankruptcy or severe financial hardships in the event of an unexpected change in your income or expenses.  Housing a small rainy day fund should be a vital part of an individual financial goals. This is of high importance if you don't already have readily available funds in your account for covering any unanticipated expenses. They provide financial security because they give you funds to fall back on if you become ill, or if you or your spouse loses your job, you incur large medical bills, or have an unexpected large bill such as a major car or home repair. You do not want to en

When investing in bonds, stocks, or mutual funds, investors have the opportunity to increase their rate of return by timing the market - investing when stock markets go up and selling before they decline. A good investor can either time the market prudently, select a good investment, or employ a combination of both to increase his or her rate of return. However, any attempt to increase your rate of return by timing the market entails higher risk. Investors who actively try to time the market should realize that sometimes the unexpected does happen and they could lose money or forgo an excellent return. Timing the market is difficult. To be successful, you have to make two investment decisions correctly: one to sell and one to buy. If you get either wrong in the short term you are out of luck. In addition, investors should realize that: 1. Stock markets go up more often than they go down. 2. When stock markets decline they tend to decline very quickly. That is, sh

Follow some basic tips and you will avoid picking the wrong mutual fund / unit trust fund. We have all heard about the advantages of investing in a mutual fund over trying to pick individual stocks. First of all, mutual funds hire professional analysts that are market experts and devout many hours of study to the various stocks. Unless you want to devout a large portion of your free time to the study of the financial reports, you probably won't have as much information to make a decision as a mutual fund manager. Then there is the well documented advantage of diversification. Risk is reduced by holding several non correlated investments. Put simply, some go up, some go down and combined, the return levels off the fluctuations, or risk. Finally, a mutual fund offers smaller investors a chance to invest in small increments rather than having to save a large chunk of cash to purchase 100 shares of stock. Given the above advantages, it's no wonder that mutual funds ha

On 16 Feb 2019, Employees Provident Fund (EPF) has declared a dividend rate of 6.15% for Conventional Savings 2018, and 5.9% for Shariah Savings 2018. Here is the table on the EPF Dividend Rate in the past 20 years. Why EPF can maintain 4,25 % to 6.9% dividend for the past 20 years? One of the important part is portfolio management. Refer to EPF Annual Report, they always maintain the portfolio into Real Estate (10%), Cash (3%), Fixed Income (51%) and Equity (36%) Note : Equity could be diversified partially to oversea equities as well.   This is very important for you if you want to maintain the yearly return between 4% to 7% per year. If you are investing into fixed deposit only and always complain about the return is too low then there is your problem, not the fixed deposit's problem. If you are investing your money into unit trust by only choosing equity funds, then you might facing negative in your unit trust (if you only invest in local/Malaysia market).

Many investors talking about the next global financial crisis after 2008. They say there is a circle like 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, 2000 dot.com bubble, 2008 Global Financial Crisis and now comes to 2018... Everybody is talking about the crisis but no one knows when the crisis will happen. In fact, financial crisis is happening every year. You can simply google on  List of economic crises  then all the history will be listed down for you. The question is, how can you turn the crisis to opportunity? Are you ever ready on the next crisis? Now, you go back to study your own portfolio... 100% cash (FD)? 100% equities (stocks)? 100% properties? 100% unit trust funds? 100% on own business? Non of the above? If you are holding some unit trust funds in your portfolio, what would you do with it? Stay put? Re-balancing your portfolio? Or keep investing? There is always no 100% right answer in investment. I would say portfolio management plays an important part in thi

Ryan is a basketball player who play a forward position in his team. He trained hard in every training session. No matter on his stamina, shooting skill, dribbling, blocking and he is strong on physical too. He is a determined player and he wants to score at least 20 points in every game that he involve. During the game, when Ryan got the ball, he quickly pas the ball to his teammate. Even he had a clear chance to throw a shoot, but he just pass the ball out. End of the game, Ryan only scored 6 points. The coach asked him, "Why you didn't take the shoot when there were several chances to throw the shoot?" Ryan replied, "Coach, every time when I get the ball... I feel no confident and doubt on the ball, I am not sure the ball that I shoot out can score or not?" The coach and teammate were shocked. "You had been training so hard all the while and now you have the doubt?" Coach said. "You have to focus the right thing son.." &q