New Year was over and the Chinese Lunar New Year 2 weeks celebration would be over soon! Time really went by quickly and in two shakes of tail, year 2018 would be gone in a flash! Of course I hope to post more blogs but with limited time to do so many things, there probably won’t be too many postings.
The month of January swung by pretty fast! It was like there was a frenzy to catch up on all the follow ups on the many inquiries, which hopefully would translate to more sales for my workplace.
This year, the long awaited GE14 (14th General Election) in Malaysia is keeping many politicians on their toes with both sides throwing scum and muck at each with the upper hand and underhand tactics going in favour of the current ruling elite as they have more resources for their propaganda.
Still the man on the street have to earn their keep and inflation was an ever growing spectre. I received a comment from a reader, though he liked my postings, but didn’t like the way I kwetch about rising cost of living as that was normal for a booming economy. Yes, I did study economics, and inflation was part and parcel of a natural healthy economy. But what was not natural was the lost in value of the Malaysian Ringgit from the mismanagement and scandal ridden you-know-what supposedly sovereign fund which cause our value to tank.
Thankfully, competition was alive and healthy in this economy and the technological progress meant I could find new ways of doing certain things at a lower cost. Last year I managed to scrub off my Astro subscription and switch over to iFlix streaming services. That really shaved the most on my monthly expenses. Then Maxis had an offer that was much better than Unifi, and I got to cut down a little more. But I did add on some expenses on Spotify using the family package sharing the subscription with my other half and my other relations. My in-laws did share the cost, but eventually I would be giving it to them ex-gratia once the year was up, since they did help out in many ways, and the amount wasn’t so much.
Despite Malaysia being a small country with limited spending power, some imported items still maintained their price despite our weaken Ringgit value. So I guessed the exporters still wanted to keep their products moving though earning less margin or the importers has very good negotiation. Whichever their reasoning, it was good for me as those food stuff items were really nice and the cheaper replacements just didn’t cut it.
Since my time was getting severely limited, I had decided to give up some of my websites. No point paying yearly domain fees for projects that I’m not likely to do anything about it. Besides Google has really made it much more difficult now to get good ranking. You would need to put in super effort to get anywhere near the top. I’m seeing only content powerhouse where there was team to post popular items and shopping sites getting top ranking. So much for trying to earn extra from Adsense. And now with more requirement like secure sites and mobile friendly webpage or else getting your website dump out of ranking meant a lot more work to fix up my website.
Better I try my hand on other things and dumping some amount in the KLSE Bursa did yield some interesting results albeit a risky one. I target mostly blue chip counters; still there were some hits and misses. And some that did well previously was now struggling and I lost much of its capital value. Hopefully the good counters would more than cover for the bad performing ones.
Anyway here’s to a new lunar year, with some new stuffs along the way to cheer one up!