Saving & Investment

It has been almost 1 month I am not writing anything in this blog. I don’t why. Maybe because two of my angel that always keep me and my wife occupied all the time.

I want to share about saving and investment in this post. Yesterday I’ve already pecah my tabung and found out that I’ve managed to save about RM80 for the past few months. That money I deposited to my daughter’s account at Tabung Haji. Every day for the past 4 years where I am not a student anymore and earning some money every month, I’ve always saved whatever coins left at the end of the day. It has always been helpful to me in my effort to save.

But today can we still rely on saving for our future? I don’t think so. Bank Negara Malaysia announced that Inflation rate on June 2008 (last month) has reached 6% (after the announcement of new Petrol price). What a big change has happened. I think the rate months before that could not more than 5%. With this inflation going up I think mere saving account in the bank could not sustain our need in the future. The value of the money we put in the saving account of any bank although the bank pay you hibah or interest will depreciate.
So what to do?

I think what we should do now is keep on save a portion of your month end earning and invest it regularly. But where to invest? The safest place I can think right now is investing in gold. Whether you go buy the gold coin/bullion (like kijang emas offered by BNM or Dinar Kelantan offered by Kelantan govt) or you can try to invest in the gold saving account offered by certain bank in this country. The concept of gold saving account is that you’re buying gold but you don’t have to save it physically because the bank will keep it for you. When you open the account, you will buy the gold according to international market price. The price is lower than you buying gold in the goldsmith where workmanship cost is added. The benefit of this kind of investment is that from historical record, we see that the gold value will appreciate almost at the same rate of the CPI or inflation. Now you have a saving account which can give you hedging tools against inflation.

Other investment is traditional investment like in the stock market, unit trust and property. This kind of investment will have higher risk than saving especially investing in the stock market. But we must remember the popular concept in investment “ the higher the risk the higher the return”. I will continue in other post.