Personal Money Tips

For my regular readers to my blog, I appologize for not posting as regular as I wanted to. This is the downside to blogging I guess. What have I been up to?

Well, I was locked away the past 2 weeks in a Tax Planning class. Not 2 full weeks but 2 days out of 5 working days for 2 consecutive weeks. By the time the class is over, I felt too drained to write anything. Add the urgent things I had to clear at the office, overwhelm is an understatement.

Anyway, I learned a lot of good stuff at the Tax Planning class. Here are several tips for you regarding tax that I picked up.

1. Keep your receipts.

If you have spent any money, keep the receipt. You’ll never know when you might need it. This applies both to individuals and even more so, for business owners. Because of some changes in the tax law, of which I was not aware off, I could claim entertainment expenses in year 2004. This was not allowed up until 2003 ( this applies to Malaysia only ). So I lost out some over here due to ignorance. There are conditions you must meet in order to claim entertainment expense. The lesson here, keep your receipts.

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I surfed over to Sarah’s site Frugal Underground. I first came across this site a few weeks ago from the LinkedIn Blogger group.

Sarah did an interesting survey asking how much we save, since the visitors would most likely be the frugal type. I’m sure readers of my site would most likely fall into that category too. When I clicked over to see the results of the poll, I noted that the largest group have savings that will last them more than 12 months. The next largest group have savings of between 4 to 6 months.

Although this poll just mentioned savings alone and not divided into whether the savings are invested or not, I felt that if the savings is not invested, then a large number of people might be too conservative. I’m just speculating here that maybe a lot ofl that money could be in low yielding investment or a savings account. It will be lazy money.

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I’m not sure why but it seems my article on tithing is quite popular. Perhaps there are those who wants to know, why and how to tithe or give away their money. I’ll say “Yay” to that. It proves there’s plenty of good in our materialistic world today, even in this era of “me first”.

Closer to home, I surfed over to LiewCF.com and found out about World Vision. Liew, who also donates a portion of his money to charities, recently decided to channel his funds to World Vision Malaysia.

World Vision is a Christian, non-profit humanitarian aid organization engaged in emergency relief and development work among the world’s poor and needy communities. Founded in 1950, World Vision runs more than 5,000 projects in more than 103 countries around the world which impact the lives of 50 million people irrespective of their nationality, race, politics, sex, age or religion.

Pretty impressive work they are doing to make this world a better place. By the way, according to a speech by Kofi Annan, “The richest fifth of the world’s people consumes 86% of all goods and services while the poorest fifth consumes just 1.3%. Indeed, the richest fifth consumes 45% of all meat and fish, 58% of all energy used and 84% of all paper, has 74% of all telephone lines and owns 87% of all vehicles”. Sure made me think how fortunate I am, in spite of the recent “troubles”.

If you have more than you need, I challenge you to help the less fortunate. You can read more about World Vision here.