1st Hari Raya Celebration

I moved into my new house on the day before Hari Raya last year. As a result, during the month of Hari Raya 2016, I spent a lot of time to do finishing touch on my house renovation, decoration and cleaning. There was only limited number of old neighbors visited my house.

This year, for the first time, my family organized a small gathering for new neighbors who also just moved into the neighborhood. They are all from the same development phase as me.

In a small group, it is easier to get to know each other. The main hall is comfortable enough to have more than twenty people at a time. But, my wife and I decided to have this special gathering to get to know the new neighbors.

Half of us are property investors. And one of us is a full time property investor. It means he has no other income but only by property buying and selling.

The women were enjoying the fresh air at the outside of the house.

We enjoy each other company until past mid-night.

Traffic Jam due to Poor Mentality

We can have a world class facility or infrastructure, but poor mentality by society always fails us. Developers and government agencies can make good plans and implementation, but in the end, it is always the end users who decide the outcome especially when we are on the road.

Yesterday, my family and I wanted to go to my brother's house at Putrajaya from Rembau, Negeri Sembilan. It was supposed to be about an hour journey. But, we faced a heavy traffic jam before we even reach Senawang exit. It was a long queue with vehicles crawling to almost a halt.

I was wondering whether there was a huge accident ahead. The worst stretch with traffic jam was between Nilai to Bandar Putra Sri Mahkota. After passing Bandar Putra Sri Mahkota, the traffic went faster although it was still less than 50 km/h. Then, I saw the culprit ahead. The drivers on the highway were driving slowing because they were watching a Plus Ronda vehicle was helping a damage car on the emergency lane. Due to this, my travel time became more than two hours.

The drivers were not helping actual. Instead, they were making other people at the back miserable. This is the poor mentality of Malaysian drivers. I hope Plus Ronda can deploy a huge canvas or whatever the material which can cover the entire vehicles involved in any accident, damages or stop. Thus, drivers on the highway cannot see anything and drive their vehicles at a normal speed.

Work harder to settle loans or just laid back and blame the economy

I used to believe loans are bad for personal use. Once a loan was made, I felt happy for a while since my objective to acquire things have been achieved. After a few months, the burden to pay the monthly installment will kick in. I will lost new opportunity to buy other things or invest the excess money. One thing for sure, I have to work harder and smarter to get more income. So, when I want to buy my second home, I calculated I must have a consistent part time income every month.

The question is what kind of part time job should be done. Well for starter, I started with my available skills which is electronic design. Initially, I just followed my friend work on designing automation system using PLC. It was an expensive solution at the time. I want to use custom made microcontroller based design. But, I have difficulty to find the resources at the time. Since the profit was still reasonable using PLC, we save a lot of development time.

At the same time, my hobby was to learn to write programs for Microsoft Windows operating system. It was a hard thing to do at the time since www was at infancy and there was almost no book on it at the time. During my degree program, it was not part of the curriculum. It was a big challenge for me but I love it. After several months learning the tools, my friend asked for my help to build a simple database for Ms Windows OS. It was an instance yes answer even though it was not much. But the experience and the thrill to produce something out of my hobby were really exciting! Another friend of mine ask me to translate the learning process in Bahasa Malaysia and teach his staffs. It was a new challenge to me because I have never teach programming before. Then, my electronic projects demanded me to integrate the electronic designs with database and GUI.

So, my hobby have become my consistent part time job. Even though it was difficult, I really had fun doing it plus the profit keep increasing over the time. And since it was my hobby, I have no problem to accept any new challenge until I manage to reverse engineer Variable Message Signage (VMS) for Perbadanan Putrajaya. My part was worth about half a million but the total project cost was more than six million. It was huge for me.

At the mean time, my property investment worth and rental fee kept increasing. So, I believe if I did not do any property investment, I will just laid back on the couch and enjoy the TV and video shows every weekends. Why bother to find more money when my salary as a lecturer was stable enough.

Never too Late for a Refund

After almost ten years I bought my first shop lot, I got a refund a few months ago! I have never think about the deposit money anymore. The developer contacted me to refund the money.

I only paid RM1,000 for the deposit. While the rest of the price was covered in the loan. Thus, the deposit money was used to pay for the deposit of utilities. The excess deposit was refunded to me. I bought satay for my family using the money, horey!