Here's My Story

Last year, I opened a joint account with my sister at Maybank . Couple of months ago, I received a mail informing me that my account was "inactive" and was given 30 days from the date of the mail to go to any branch to reactivate it. Failure to do so would incur a administration charge of RM 10 per year 😐 Well, it was already past the 30-day grace period by the time I read the mail. My sister told me that her children's accounts weren't charged anything despite reactivating their accounts past the deadline. Oh, that's great. So I went to the nearest branch the next day. Fortunately, there was hardly any customer and so I was quickly attended to by the office at the front counter. After he did something with my ATM/debit card, I was asked to withdraw money at the the ATM machine to "show" activity. I tried a few machines but didn't work: the machine refused to proceed to next step after taking in the card and spat it out. He then directed me to his c...

I rarely fly. Once a year, for sure I'll make a trip to Australia to spend time with my sister and her family, something that I enjoyed tremendously and of course subjected to their agreement on timing etc. I typically will fly Malaysia Airlines (MAS) to Australia and fly Singapore Airlines (SIA) back home. Other than that, I might at most fly to Singapore once a year via Firefly. In recent years, right after I purchased MAS ticket, I received an email from them within the same day or the next day, offering discount on the next flight. This seems to be a useless promotion to me: how likely that I would want to purchase another flight ticket right after having purchased one already? I would think that even for the those who fly often, they wouldn't have planned that much ahead, right?  Imagine for a typical working person: "I just purchased flight ticket to Australia for my planned vacation in 6 months time and ooooh, they just offered me discount on the next flight. Fantas...

Received email from CIMB, telling me about implementation of e-invoicing. It was much later on, after I spoke with a customer service officer, that I learned that the only thing they wanted customers to do was to update their NRIC to the new format if they had the old one in the database. That's it. However, instead of just saying that, they gave a whole nine paragraphs or so about e-invocing, including this part: "In the meantime, please refer to our FAQs via CIMB webpage for more information on e-Invoicing.", where "FAQ" is a clickable link. I clicked on that link and yes, it provided a lot of information, including this: "How can I provide my e-Invoicing information? For individual customers: You can submit the e-Invoicing Information Update Form via CIMB Clicks (web) and CIMB OCTO (app). For customers without digital channel access: You can download, fill up and print the e-Invoicing Information Update Form from CIMB website." So I went through hoo...

So, previously, when the toilet roll is in within the toilet cubicle itself, you can use exactly as needed but now, surely you would be on the safe side by taking more than needed? That's for people who do not want to waste. Imagine those who use it wantonly. They certainly would not take less. This will result in more wastage, not less. What are they thinking?

    I might spend $100.

For years, I've been ordering Norwegian fjord trout (and the occassional Atlantic salmon when it was cheaper), fresh enough to be eaten raw, from Top Catch Fisheries at Taman Megah. I would place the order in advance and they would bill me in the morning of my requested pick-up date. I would order 300g of the fish but understandably they couldn't cut exactly that much from the bigger slab. Often, I would get slightly above it. If I recall correctly, the most I got was 330g. Couple of months ago, right after I put in my advance order, I was surprised to be billed right away for 300 gm. I reminded them that it as for pick-up in a few days time and not for the day itself, which they acknowledged. They want to speed-up the process, rather than billing me on that day. If payment wasn't made on that day, they requested that I remind them of my order that day. Incidentally, ever since they had a change of staff in charge of taking care of advance order, half of the time they forgo...

 

Recently, I was recounting to my sisters lucky incidents that happened to our family. For me, I brought up the example of how I got the scholarship to ANU: The only way I could study overseas was to get a scholarship that must at least cover tuition fee. Hence, I was scouting for university that had Actuarial Science course and offered scholarship. In Australia, at that time, I only knew Macquarie University and University of Melbourne offered the course but neither offered scholarships, at least not to oversease students. A schoolmate, who was also interested in Actuarial Science, asked me whether I want to go together with her to the Australia Education fair. I declined because of the reason I gave above. Later, after she had already gone to the fair, she told me that ANU offered the course and also scholarship that we could apply. I was luckly on 4 fronts in this instance: ANU had the course I wanted, they offered scholarship, a schoolmate went to the fair specifically looking for t...

If you need to consult a specialist, how would you choose one? If you hadn't consulted one before, you might ask family and friends for recommendations. You might even wider your enquiries to social media and forums.  Next, you might look for reviews online but those are rare in Malaysia. Maybe go for the one with most experience but that information is also not easily available. If all else fails, maybe you look at their credentials i.e. professional and academic qualifications and where they came from. In Malaysia, until 2002, admission to public universities were done by race first and then merit second. The bulk of the quota was reserved for Bumiputera, of which the majority of them were Malays. The " quota system remains in the matriculation colleges with a 90% quota for Bumiputeras, while certain foundation courses are exclusively for Bumiputeras ." This partly resulted in Bumiputera students constituting 81.9% of students in public universities as at Dec 2023. It w...

There was an episode in The Good Doctor where this question came up: what do you want to do if you know you have only 6 months to live? I thought about it and I'm pleasantly surprised that the answer is that I will still do the same thing i.e. spend as much time as possible with my husband, my mum, my sisters and their respective families. I probably will travel more to spend even more time with them. In a sense, I'm fortunate that I don't have a bucket list that includes, say, visit certain countries, achieve certain academic/sports milestones etc. I'm happy and blessed :)

As with many condos, there are residents who are delinquents in paying the monthly maintenance fees and some of the debt can be staggering. At a particular condo, the management committee struck a deal with a tenant that allowed the tenant to pay lower maintenance fee until their financial situation improved but when it did improve, they refused to pay more. I heard that this case when before the tribunal and the committee lost. Go figures. Why? I don't know. I am not privy to the agreement but it sounds dubious to me. What's stopping the committee from making similar deal with, say, their loves ones and lower the fee to, say, RM 1 per month?

Recently, the Minister of Transport announced that drivers who renew their driving liences directly with JPJ (instead of, say, at post office or via MyEG) and choose to renew for 10 years will need to pay fee for 9 years i.e. discount of 1 year (RM 270 instead of RM 300). The maximum period the last time I renewed was only 5 years. I was keen on the 10-year period and so might as well try to get the discount. First thing I did was to register to use JPJ Digital Platform: mySIKAP portal. That was easy. Once registered, I searched the portal for the option of renewing driving license, which thankfuly was quite easy to spot. The first problem encountered was somehow my credit card payment failed, despite having gone through the "input OTP" stage. Fortunately, my mobile banking app repeatedly showed that the payment didn't go through and so I proceeded to pay via online bank transfer. Then I encountered a second problem: unlike what I read online, I didn't get any receipt...

I renewed my passport recently. Heard some horror stories in recent years. So I researched online to find out exactly how it should be done. Turned out that while one could walk-in, the default SOP by the Immigration Department was to apply for it online and then collect in-person. I spent most of the time fiddling with the photograph. Otherwise, the whole process was quite a breeze. Collection took only 15 minutes. So here are the key points I would like to highlight: Go to the official website and read the guideline there. Everything is there. Follow it exactly and you should be fine. Get someone to take photograph of you with white background and in brightly-lit place. Of course you can cut-short the process by just going to a photo studio but make sure you tell them you're doing it to apply for Malaysia passport and that they should provide you digital copies of the photographs. If the background isn't white enough (like mine), use a software to replace background colour wi...

I can't remember where I read this. It went something like this: If you're spending your own money for your your benefit, you'll likely try your utmost best in handling the money. If you're spending someone else's money for your benefit, you'll be less careful but not careless as the fund may dry up. The worst scenario is when you're spending someone else's money for another person's benefit. You'll have the least incentive/motivation to do it wisely. This is what a government does!

Recently I lamented the loss of a public sports facility that was regularly used by a couple of schools to train. "So what? Kampung schools don't have access to such facility either," a friend retorted. What? Hold on. So, are you saying that since there are starving people in Africa, it's ok for you to starve too? The next time someone try to dissuade you from fighting for something better because many others don't have that thing, ask them that question.

My aunt's friend is convinced that the actual number of daily new cases of Covid-19 is LOWER because we should have achieveds herd immunity already. Her reasons: vaccination rate of around 80% with daily new cases of 20k-30k. So it's not logical that we still have such high number of daily cases. So she told my aunt that the govt is hiding the actual lower number to scare us into obedience, presumedly because they want us to continue following strict SOPs. Well, if that's the case, why are we opening up on 1st April and therefore letting go of many strict SOPs? Maybe it'll be an April Fool's joke 😂 Instead, if the aim is to get us to adopt strict SOPs, the government should be adopting China's zero Covid-19 policy: no opening up until there's no more case. None of the vaccine provide 100% protection vs Covid-19, regardless of variant. Hence, even the vaccinated ones can be infected. Re Omicron, the chances of getting infected is higher than that of other va...

2021 is a year I think many of us want to put behind us. It was another year of Covid-19 pandemic, with worse variant, the Delta variant, rampaging all over. Towards the end, the Omicron variant emerged, which appeared to be even more transmissible. Initial observation seems to indicate that it's less lethal but there's still not enough data to be conclusive as there are other confounding factors like vaccine and prior infections. I honestly thought the pandemic would be over by mid-2021, mostly based on vaccination drive. WHO is right about one thing: no country is safe until every country is safe. It was a plea for the richer countries to help directly/indirectly to vaccinate the poorer countries.  Once again, I couldn't travel to visit my sister and her family in Australia. As for my mum and my sister in Penang, I could do it only recently, after 16 months of absence.  Despite this difficult time, I am very grateful that we are all safe, fully-vaccinated (some of us alre...

The actuary I'm working with plans to retire in about a decade time and offered to give his business to me during a period of transition. I was flattered but declined the offer. He took it well and thanked me for the help I've given and will be giving in future until he retires. Among my response was the following: My dad practised a healthy lifestyle. He ate right, exercised daily and socialised frequently. Except when he was much younger, he didn't smoke and he drank only occasionally. When he was aged 60+, I even boldly predicted that he would live to at least 80+ and possibly to 90, especially given that my grandfather managed to live that old. Yet, despite these, he was taken away by cancer at the age of 73. This got me thinking about my life.......given the myriad of ill-health conditions I have, the period of good quality of life may even be shorter than that. There are things I want to do and more actuarial work isn't one of them. Hence my decision. Also, I don...

Woke up to pee. Sun was already up. Went back to bed after peeing. Brain : Oooh today is vaccination day Me: Shut up and go back to sleep. Or at least rest. Brain : What shall we get for lunch later? Me : Omg stop fighting me. 😬

So, a friend applied for OKU card September last year and recently wondered why he hadn't received his card. He called their phone number but nobody picked. Hence, he made a trip to the Welfare Dept. Turned out that they do not inform applicants when it's ready, applicants are supposed to check with them on the status of their cards, their phone wasn't working properly, and as an alternative, applicants can check the status online. How on earth could my friend know all of these if they didn't tell him when he handed in his application? This is Welfare Dept, which supposed to help people with disabilities and so they supposed to  make it easier for them, not harder! Even people without disabilities would expect them to give such information. My friend has executive function deficit and so, understandably, it didn't occur to him to ask. It is no wonder that the department had many unclaimed OKU cards. Goodness! They have failed our disabled people. A note from the fri...