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Posts Tagged ‘Personal Finance’

Set Yourself Free by Yap Ming Hui

December 17th, 2012


Are you a Malaysian middle class? What is Malaysian middle class?
Does a Malaysian middle class person simply means you are not poor and you are not rich? What is the actual definition?

Of course, middle class Malaysian represents the larger majority of the citizens of Malaysia. This includes most of the working professionals and the mass affluent. They are those with a monthly income between RM5,000 and RM20,000 (source).

This is the group of people that are most likely to get stuck in the rat race of accumulating money, myself included.
Who does not want to be rich and wealthy? Or at the very least, know that you can be financially free and be able to retire comfortably without the worries of being able to survive financially in your remaining years?

Set Yourself Free is a book by a Malaysian, Yap Ming Hui, on how to optimise your money and become wealthy with minimum effort and risk.
This book addresses the reasons why millions of Middle Class Malaysians fail to make that simple leap to achieve financial freedom.

About Author
Yap Ming Hui is an Independent Financial Advisor (IFA).
He is also the author of five other financial books:

  • You Can’t Manage Your Money: Especially When You’re Rich
  • Maximise What You’ve Got: No Matter How Much you Have Now
  • MaxWealth: How To Maximise Your Wealth Beyond Investment Returns
  • Family Office: The Super Rich’s Secret to Wealth Maximisation
  • The Roadmap to Financial Freedom: The Ultimate Guide to Achieve Financial Freedom

Yap is the Founder and Managing Director of Whitman Independent Advisors Sdn Bhd, a leading independent financial advisory firm in Malaysia which specialises in helping clients achieve financial freedom and become wealthy by optimising their money. Whitman is a licensed financial advisory company by the Securities Commission and Bank Negara Malaysia.

He has also appeared in the national television and radio sharing financial tips and views. Besides that, he also has written financial related topics and hosted columns in national prints while being interviewed by broadcast media.

The Book

The book is written in a simple-to-understand manner, as the target readers are middle class Malaysians. No technical jargon but common financial terms that even students can understand.

The books starts from the definition of middle class Malaysians and generalizes the people to six category (can be seen from the book cover).
The categories are Poor, Middle Class, Rich, Self Sufficient, Financially Free and finally the Wealthy.
These categories are also grouped as Money-making and Money-optimisation. Throughout the book, Yap advocates on money optimisation, the path from middle class to wealthy is to be financially free instead of taking the rich route.

It then highlights the reasons why most people will not achieve financial freedom.
Even though we may think we are doing our finances right, there are many things that will come along in our life and derail our journey to financial freedom.

Yap uses many examples of real-life scenarios and easy to understand graphs, so that the readers could understand the effect of actions taken that would affect their net-worth and the age when they could retire.

The early chapters of the book highlights the problems people face that affects their road to financial freedom.
The remaining chapters (over half of them) educates the reader about the role of Independent Financial Advisor as well as how having an IFA will benefit you to being financially free and ultimately be wealthy.

Marvin’s Take
I actually came across the existence of this book from a news article – Help for the middle class.

However, being my usual self of doubting “marketing” and “sales” articles, I am almost certain that the author will try to sell something with his book.

So eventually, I got hold of the book and found out that I am not wrong but not fully right either. 🙂

Firstly, the book does highlight in general what are the problems that will impede the middle class from heading the road to financial freedom, but this is merely half of the content.
However, I am almost certain, most people would know the basic stuff of saving and investing, but most also will not be having enough information about how to reach the goals and if they are moving to the right direction. The examples especially the graphs with some simulation provided in this book, helps a lot in this area.

Then most of the chapters in this book talks about having the Independent Financial Advisor to help you optimize your finances so that eventually you get to be financially free and ultimately wealthy.

There are many things that I agree and especially that having a IFA is like a coordinator that relieves off your burden to look into all aspects of personal finances. One example given is an insurance agent is actually in conflict with their clients as they actually earns by commissions. The more being sold to the client, the more commission earned, but are they really optimized for the client?
IFA on the other hand, is said to be working together with the client, instead of earning from commissions, that might be for certain parties, they target to increase their client’s net worth, and probably get a certain percentage from that.
However, in my opinion, it is still possible for a IFA to be biased towards certain parties and to help sell products for certain parties.

Although the book is a target for middle class, but the idea that I get from the book is that to engage the services of a IFA, or probably from the author’s company, one would need a current net worth of RM 1 or 2 million at the very least.
I’m not sure how many middle class Malaysians can have that.

All in all, the book is a good read to reflect upon myself and to correct the ways I am taking to be financially free and be able to retire comfortably in the future.
It also introduces the services of IFA in greater detail than being just the “money consultant for the rich”.

Here’s a 15 minutes video of the interview with Yap Ming Hui on this book with Bernama.

I could probably name myself an Independent Book Reviewer, what do you think? 🙂
Read my unbiased book reviews here.

Books, Good To Know, Malaysia, Money Matters, Review , , ,

One Page Personal Finance Ebook

May 28th, 2009

Another Free Personal Finance ebook, with tips on how to Live Frugal, Earn More, Manage Money and Control Your Own Destiny.

The single illustrated page will give you the conceptual idea and the content in point form is great for fast browse through.

One Page Personal Finance Ebook by marvin337

Source of the document: http://www.thesimpledollar.com/onepage/

Credits to Trent Hamm, owner of The Simple Dollar blog.

Money Matters, Review ,

Work hard or work smart?

May 15th, 2009

This is a story of Pablo and Bruno or the parable of the pipeline.

Working to get money
Most of us work to earn money. Of course, there are multiple ways to earn money for a living. You could earn a living by working half an hour a day, eight hours a day or twenty hours a day.
You could also work legally or illegally. Except on committing crimes for money which is definitely a wrong way of earning money, there are no any wrong ways of earning money if you are doing it legally or with ethics.

Time VS Money
More often than not, money is earned through the exchange of time.
What’s your rate?
For a simpler example, a promoter is paid $10 per hour to sell products, his/her rate is $10 per hour.
If the promoter wants to get $100 a day, 10 hours would then be spent on working to get the $100. How many hours are needed to earn $300?
Can you work your way with more hours in return to get more $$$?
Do you have time for other things in your life?

More Time = More Money
If more time equals more money, are we going to work extra hours?
Do not forget that we only have 24 hours a day.
If we get less rest that is actually needed, it will affect our productivity and also reduce the working hours we are able to use out of the 24 hours.

Saving and not spending
Are we saving enough with the money we earned? If we work extra hours for it, exchanging hour by hour for the money want, how are we going to spend it?
If we hit a lottery or jackpot, how are we going to spend it?
Should we save it just like our hard earned money or spend it since it’s a windfall?

The case of working harder (Bruno)
In the parable, Bruno worked hard by carrying more pails and also larger pails to get the extra money he wanted. I believe most working people are the same, getting paid for their skills, effort and time, extra pay with extra time and more responsibilities. Health could also be something one sacrifices for money, though it varies between job positions.
There is nothing wrong with the story of Bruno, and if he knows how to save well, I think he could be a very rich man.

The case of working harder or smarter? (Pablo)
Pablo did not work overtime or carry larger pails, but he did work overtime. He diverted his effort to build a pipleline for long term streaming income. He still need to maintain his lifestyle but made an extra channel of revenue for himself. When the pipeline is launched, he had extra income coming in even without working and if the revenue could cover his daily pails, he could have retire!

If you are expecting me to sell something here or getting you to join a network, unfortunately you are going for disappointment.
I do not have a pipeline, but I am seeing this video presentation as something worthy to ponder upon and to share it with you.

Financial management is something worth learning and something which I’m still learning. It’s just that I start to evaluate myself with this story and found out I used to think I should work hard. That have not changed, but I think I should start working smarter now.

Do you have a pipeline? If you do, do you share it with others? If no, maybe you can start thinking of it now?

By the way, I do not think work hard and work smart are mutually exclusive.
Instead of work hard OR work smart we should work hard AND work smart. 🙂

Any pipeline oppurtunity to recommend me?

Internet Marketing, Money Matters , , , ,