Zhang Zi Yi?

I am in the process of updating my personal financial blog lists that I read constantly to keep me updated on the latest trend and also to predict the coming trend in our ever challenging economic outlook. (Inflation is seriously very high year by year with no pause in sight. Maybe an interest hike end of year might do some dampening?)

The reason for me updating are as follows: (still updating)

1) The blogger went AWOL for a very long time. Aka no updates.Looks like some financial bloggers just fizzled off. Perhaps there is no monetary returns for doing so. More on this to the point 2.

I don't make money off my blog but I still write , simply because I like personal finance topics and in some way annotate my journey to achieve financial freedom.

2) Here is point number 2. I had to remove some finance blogs on my list simply because they restrict their blog readership to invitation only. The reason to do so i think is simply because they make their blog PAY-PER-VIEW aka you need to pay some membership fee to access their blog posting. Usually these blogs are related to stock analysis/picks. 

Oh well, at least these bloggers continue to blog because of the monetary returns. Good for them. ^_^

3) The good thing is that I found more noteworthy free, new, active financial bloggers out there that is willing to share their knowledge for free for now at least before they become 'too popular'. Or I am just being pessimistic since nowadays nothing is free.

So the old must go so that the new can come in.

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For those that have a good writing flair, you can try to write a book, have it published to be sold on Amazon, the largest book store in the world! I see that there is birth of local writers booming in the publishing world. With the age of internet, the world is truly your oyster. Aim High! 

How easy it is? Take it from a 1st time aspiring writer!! Seraphina :D

Extracted from 

http://seraphinanova.blogspot.com/

What in hell happened to the publishing industry?

I wrote a novel and sent it out for publication. To my surprise I received multiple offers within a week. (I expected years of rejection, so I wasn't prepared.) It's set for release in the fall. In the meantime, I just entered a foreign land of marketing and promotion. They don't tell you that part! The hard part comes after you have written the damn thing. My blog explores how to navigate this crazy world of Amazon and Google ratings. I will be writing my next book about turning your book into a bestseller through online promotion after this! 

Join the conversation into her blog.

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Invest in Maybank Silver Investment Account to enjoy more benefits with the potential silver market!

Get FREE 10grams of silver with every 3.5kg silver investment and you'll also get FREE stamp duty worth RM10 for every new opening of Silver account with 100grams and above.

Promotion Period: 15 March - 14 June 2013

Click here for Campaign Terms and Conditions.

Click here for more info on Maybank Silver Investment Account.

Disclaimer: The returns on Maybank Silver Investment Account (MSIA) are subject to silver price fluctuations. Customers are advised to read and understand the product before making any investment. Maybank Silver Investment Account (MSIA) is not insured by Perbadanan Insurans Deposit Malaysia (PIDM).

So below is the ETF for Silver aka SLV. (looks like it touch ~34 USD-ish at one point. Now it is on a downtrend. There is no capitulation for precious metal even though the Cyprus fiasco shows that paper money can seriously easily lose its value)

With the no happy ending in sight for Genneva & Bestino investors,  it is best to invest in precious metal with established banks . (Last time I heard, that Genneva investors are gunning for an judicial review to get their money back. I am not sure when are they going to sue the company though)

See here for legal ways and safe ways to invest in precious metals.

http://www.knowthymoney.com/2012/10/maybank-silver-investment-account.html

http://www.knowthymoney.com/2012/10/a-good-entry-point-into-gold-investment.html

http://www.knowthymoney.com/2012/08/gold-investment-account-gia-via.html

http://www.knowthymoney.com/2011/08/gold-alternative-investment-silver-slv.html

http://www.knowthymoney.com/2011/08/gold-investment-stock-gld-etf.html

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We always heard of this term, "Multiple Source Of Income" being spun around in the financial freedom arena. Do you know what it means? Why does it matter to you??. Here are 5 reasons for you not to rely on a single income + (a video of) I find it to be very truthful. (P.S The blond girl in the video is very cute :p )  

In my honest opinion, multiple source of income means the different ways or methods you derived your income besides your 9am to 5pm job. There is a lot of ways to achieve this:

1. Investments in properties, mutual fund, sukuk bonds (see the coming DanaInfra sukuk that promises at least 3.7% semi annual payout), etc

2. Getting a part time job. (hopefully , you are able to keep your current job)

3. Owning an auto-pilot businesses that requires very little supervision, etc (starting a business in the beginning usually takes time)

But for me, in anything you do , you need to have passion in your work so it can be successful and fruitful. Don't you agree with me on this?

My multiple source of income are:

1. Investment in property, stocks and mutual funds. 

2. Income generated from my knowledge that I gained 

As I am too busy to have a part time job.. lol. P.S Blogging this site www.knowthymoney.com does not earn me any money. It is my passion :D

How about yours? Feel free to share your multiple source of income.

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As discussed in my previous post, CIMB introduce an online system for its GOLD investment schemes which is an advantage over their not-so technical updated competitors.

See the post below on how to do GOLD investment via CIMBCLICKs.

http://www.knowthymoney.com/2012/08/gold-investment-account-gia-via.html 

Since the post was a few months ago, I decided to have a look once more on what is the best entry point to enter the gold investment via CIMBCLICKs. I found one interesting fact that could give you a higher chance of profitable entry point.

In the earlier post, you will note that there is no extra expenses incurred when you buy and sell the GOLD electronically. The reason is that the bank already profited from the buy and sell spread differences & also their gold prices are not updated "live" every second of the day. GOLD is traded 24 hours  and never sleeps.

At first, I thought that the spread will be hovering consistently around ~RM10.  For example, RM175.15 - 165.45 = 9.70). Price dated 20 October, see below.

Well, the spread is important as it generally determines, at what price you need to sell so that you break even your investment. Higher buy/sell spread means that you will need to wait longer the gold prices to go even higher so that you break even or profit as compared to a lower buy/spread. 

Daily

The Gold calculator allows you to see the price movement for daily, weekly, and Monthly.

Weekly

Monthly

Did you managed to notice it??

Kudos if you did. The buy/sell spread actually is not fixed aka it actually goes down to below ~RM10  during 14 Sept to 21 September. The spread during that week is roughly ~RM5.

Well you might argue that it is not uncommon that the buy/sell spread is not constant. But remember, this online GOLD investment is not like the liquid stocks traded in the stock market where you can see the buy & sell prices changing rapidly based on the principle of supply and demand. CIMB could have make a lot of pure profit if they just maintained the ~RM10 buy & sell spread.

The buy & spread for GOLD traded in the international market is very small because of the supply and demand factor.

So in short, I like to go into investment that have small buy & sell spreads so that my investment can break even easily as compared to otherwise.

P.S Always buy physical gold or paper gold investments from reliable investment institutions. This applies to Silver too, just in case no one learns anything from the Genneva fiasco. :D

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I cashed out the money that I earn from completing my Fiverr gigs. The money is peanuts but I wanted to try out the money withdrawal flow. Initially, Fiverr only allowed withdrawal if your account reached a certain amount, if I am not mistaken is around ~USD40. Hence, roughly you need to complete around 10 gig requests. Thus, limitation prompted the netizen to doubt the legit-ness of the whole Fiverr business model. 

Luckily, Fiverr quickly responded and now there is NO such limitation.

The withdrawal process is very easy. Here are the steps:

Partial screenshot: I deleted some of the detail to protect the privacy of my Fiverr Gig buyers

1. You need a verified account for Paypal. To get a verified account, you need to give account information (credit card number, debit card, etc) to Paypal and follow thru the verification process. I am not going to discuss in detail about this crucial step.

2. When you have an verified paypal account, just click on the Sellers-> Revenue tab. You will be able to see how much money that you can withdrawal into your Paypal account. If this is your first time you click to withdraw the money, Fiverr will prompt you to enter your Paypal account ID. Remember to get this correct the first time!!, you will never ever be able to change it in the future. (P.S The PayPal info needed is the email address you use to login into Paypal. So please remember the @hotmail, @gmail as suffix) 

3. Fiverr will send an email link to verify the withdrawal transaction to your Paypal email address. Once you click that , the money is instantly received at your Paypal account. So FAST and EASY!!!

PayPal's charges 2% of the total withdrawal sum, and up to a maximum of $1 when withdrawing revenues. Withdrawing $50 or more in one go will save you a little cash. Having paid the piper, the conversion turns out to be quite good. (expected to be good) I got a USD to RM conversion rate of ~3.10.

Now the hard part is getting people to buy your Gigs at Fiverr.


Here is the old post on how to get started on Fiverr.


http://www.knowthymoney.com/2012/05/fiverr-what-are-you-willing-to-do-for-5.html

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It came as a sweet surprise,as I saw my bank account suddenly ballooned. I thought that someone had  accidentally banked in money into my account. LoL. (What are the chances of that happening). 

P.S , It happened before to me that a huge amount (a 5 digit figure) was accidentally banked into my brokerage account. But being the honest guy I am, I quickly informed my broker about it.

Then I remembered the amount deposited is similar with my 5% Sukuk that I bought around 3 years ago. The deposit included the last interest accrued.It has now fully matured :)

Wow..3 years fly by so fast. Below is my post on the Sukuk 3 years ago.

http://www.knowthymoney.com/2009/04/sukuk-bonds-rm25billion-to-govt-coffers.html

In the future, there is no doubt that more Sukuk will be issued. I read somewhere that the government is going to setup a entity whose capital will be raised by the Sukuk method to bail out our beloved MAS airline. (~9 billion, to buy new aeroplane to be leased back to MAS) . Don't think buying newer planes will turnaround the always-losing-money national airline. They should cut expenditure and restructure it to be profitable again by plugging all the financial leaks.

It would be stupid to touch on the idea of asking Khazanah or EPF to bailout MAS again since the general election fever is nearby. So money raised thru Sukuk by public subscriptions is going to be the way to go to get more money into the coffers. 

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I stumbled upon an interesting US website to earn some pocket money not long ago. Fiverr has been there for some time but i only found it by accident when surfing for outsourcing websites.

Fiverr - I think they wanted to named it as Five, Fiver, without the extra "r" in the first place (probably due to the hardship of securing the domain names). Neverthless, the name is really indicative of what it really offers. 

Fiverr offers people to offer their freelance services for $5. So anyone can literally post up to the site the things that they are willing to do for $5. So below is a simple summary on how it works for the sellers.

1. Sign up on the site

2. Post up a description of what you are willing to do for $5. This is called a GIG .Of course you cannot offer to do something sexual in nature, racial provocative, etc. (so no online escort services allowed, you don't want to end up as one of the unfortunate 48 men in the Singapore call girl scandal)

3. Wait for the Fiverr admin team to approve your GIG.

4. Once approved, just wait for anyone to buy into your GIG. 

5. Once you hit top seller or level2, you can put in more extra services for a given GIG so that you can earn more than just $5.

The business model here is that Fiverr will provide a platform for people to trade services. Fiverr will take $1 out of the $5 for every successfully completed GIG. And the remaining $4 will go to the seller. So Fiverr is actually earning like 20% for every GIG sold. This seems to be a small amount but the sheer amount of traffic and GIGs executed could bring in serious moolah.

The retention period for the money to reach the seller (the remaining $4)of the GIG from the buyer can take up to 14 days. Hence the interest incurred can be a source of income too.

As with many Startups, the earnings of the site is not widely known. But it has received some serious amount of funding from Venture Capitalists (VC).

There is more to read about if you decide to buy some GIGs. See detail info here http://fiverr.com/terms_of_service

Some of the GIGs are damn funny.So just visit that site for a look.

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If one is scared to be entrapped into a gold investment scams, the safest thing to do to reap the benefits of a soaring gold prices is to invest into the schemes promoted by our local banks.

A spread is the difference between the selling and buying price. The smaller the spread means that less leakage when doing buy/sell transaction. All prices below are on the same date for comparison purposes. (9 September). 

Do note that these investments are not covered by PIDM which provides deposit insurance. Which means that if the bank fails like what is happening in the US, you cannot get your investment back. PIDM covers most of the saving & current accounts for all banks up to RM250K for a single account. (It was previously up from RM60K only, a few years ago. It was introduced in September 2005)

Maybank

Maybank Gold Investment Account

The spread is RM7.48

Minimum gram is only 1 grams :) However no mention of physical gold delivery.

DATE	SELLING (RM/g)	BUYING (RM/g)
9 - Sep - 2011	184.28	176.80

Features	Description
Minimum Initial Purchase	1 gram
Minimum Subsequent Purchase/Sale	In multiples of 1 gram
Minimum Balance in the Account	1 gram
Gold Purchase Price	- Gold purchase will be based on the Bank's prevailing gold SELLING price quoted in RM per gram - The mode of payment accepted for purchase of gold are: Cash Debiting of current/savings account maintained with the Bank House cheque
Gold Sale/Withdrawal	- Gold sale will be based on the Bank's prevailing gold BUYING price quoted in RM per gram - Withdrawal options available are: Cash Crediting of current/savings account maintained with the Bank
Mode of Operation	Passbook
Interest	No interest payout
Stamp Duty Fee on Agreement	RM10
Replacement of Lost / Spoilt Passbook	RM15 (inclusive of Stamp Duty for Letter of Indemnity

Public Bank

The spread is RM7.43
Here you can take delivery of the physical gold with a fee of course. However, the minimum gram for Public Bank is 10grams.

Gold Investment Account as at 09/09/11 3:46 PM

	Selling Price	Buying Price
1 gram	RM 185.0300	RM 177.6000

Minimum Initial Purchase	10gms
Minimum Balance in the Account	2gms
Minimum Subsequent Purchase/ Sale	5 grams and must be in multiple of 1 gram
Gold Purchase	• Gold purchase will be based on the Bank's prevailing gold SELLING price quoted in RM per gram. • The mode of payment accepted for purchase of gold are : - cash - debiting of account - house cheque • No physical gold deposit is allowed.
Gold Sale/ Withdrawal	• Gold sale will be based on the Bank's prevailing gold BUYING price quoted in RM per gram. • Withdrawal options available are : - Cash - Crediting of account - Collection of physical gold withdrawal at selected branches
Account Opening Requirement	Customer is required to maintain either a savings account or current account prior to opening a GIA to facilitate the debiting of service fee, if any.
Service Fee	An annual fee of RM10 will be levied on the designated deposit account on the first day of the calendar year if the account balance is below 10gms as at year end.
Online Gold Trading via PBeBank.com	• Available from 9.30 a.m. to 4.45 p.m., Monday to Friday when the Bank is opened for business in the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur. • Gold purchases and sales are offered at a discounted price. • Registration of GIA for PBeBank.com online banking service is required. • Transaction Limit: Minimum 5 grams per transaction Maximum RM50,000 equivalent per GIA account per day for both gold purchases and sales.

No.	Type of Charges	Amount
1	Gold quantity balance of less than 10 grams as at 31 December each year The aforesaid service fee will be waived for new accounts opened for less than (1) month i.e. opened in the month of December.	RM10-00 per annum
2.	Replacement of lost Gold Investment Account passbook	RM10-00 plus stamp duty
3.	Stamp duty for Gold Investment Account Agreement	RM10-00
4.	Physical Gold Withdrawal - Denomination of gold bar available in 50g and 100g. Fee charged is on per piece basis.	Gold Collecting Branches 50g 100g Jalan Sultan Sulaiman RM220 RM240 Pulau Pinang/ Bagan Ajam RM250 RM270

CIMB BANK

Spread RM5.4 - The lowest among the 3 banks above. Physical delivery is also the cheapest at 1gram for RM1. However the initial minimum investment is at 10grams not 1gram like Maybank.

Selling	Buying
Gold Deposit	182.700	177.300

Minimum Initial Deposit	10 grams
Minimum subsequent Purchase / Sale	5 grams and must be in multiples of 1 gram
Minimum Quantity for Physical Gold Withdrawal	100 grams and in multiples of 100 grams
Account Opening Requirement	Customer to open an affiliate conventional savings/current account (“designated affiliated account”) prior to opening a GDA to facilitate the purchase or sale of gold and other charges. The designated affiliate account is compulsory and customers without a CIMB Bank savings/current account would be required to open one.
Mode of Operation	Passbook
Gold Purchase Price	Gold purchase will be based on the Bank’s prevailing gold SELLING price quoted in RM per gram The mode of payment accepted for purchase of gold are: - Debiting current/savings account maintained with CIMB Bank
Gold Sale/ Withdrawal	Gold sale will be based on the Bank’s prevailing gold BUYING price quoted in RM per gram Withdrawal options available are: - Credit into the designated affiliate account - Physical gold
Interest	No interest payout
Benefits	Customer will make a capital gain if there is an appreciation in gold price. To earn potentially higher return from appreciation in gold price Invest in gold without having to keep the gold physically Good hedge against inflation Affordable initial purchase and subsequent investment Convenience of investing in gold as trading is carried out through a passbook. Option of withdrawing from the GDA in physical gold.

Products/Items			Charges
1	Physical Gold Withdrawal		RM1 per gram of gold ordered (inclusive of insurance and transport charges)
2	Fee for failure of collection of physical gold ordered (in the event of failure to collect the physical gold ordered within thirty (30) business days from the date of the Bank’s notification letter)		RM1 per gram of gold ordered (inclusive of insurance and transport charges)
3	Annual Service Fee		RM5 in the event gold balance falls below 10grams at year end
4	Replacement of Lost / Spoilt Passbook		RM20 (Inclusive of Stamp Duty on Letter of Indemnity)
5	Closing of GDA (within 6 months of its opening)		RM10

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