MONEY MASTER

I've recently read a very interesting article regarding the value of debt in retirement from The Edge Markets - Personal Wealth , and I must say the article really open my mind on debt and it gives me new idea on optimizing wealth in future. I like the way the writer end the article with "“All debt is, is a magnifier of investment decisions that you make. If you make good decisions, debt will make them look better. If you make bad decisions, debt will make you look worse." The article is as follows..... CONVENTIONAL thinking would have it that to live a happy life, you must be debt-free in your retirement years. The idea is that you should be reducing your risk and focusing solely on preserving your hard-earned capital. But Thomas J Anderson, author of  The Value of Debt in Retirement: Why Everything You Have Been Told Is Wrong , tells  Personal Wealth  in a Skype interview that he believes this mantra is one of the greatest myths about retirement ever...

Today I've read an article from The Star and I do share the same sentiment with the writer that not all debt is bad especially this quote " Smart money management is not about avoiding debt; rather it is about choosing the right debt and making it work harder for you." The article also mentioned slightly on how to utilize the credit card to free up more cash flow which in the end can be use to generate more passive income. The article is as follows:- SINCE the US subprime mortgage crisis of 2007–2008, we have had an influx of credit and debt related news such as the European sovereign debt crisis (often referred to as the eurozone crisis), the European Central Bank’s quantitative easing (QE) programme and, closer home, 1MDB. It all sounds pretty daunting to the average ears and lends credence to the public’s general fear of debt. But what is debt? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as “an amount of money that you owe to a person, bank, company, etc” whil...

As the Bank Negara Malaysa (BNM), the Malaysia Central Bank trying to tighten the borrowing rule, I’ve been read­ing a lot of arti­cles lately about ways to get out of debt, and I’m not impressed at most of the articles that I've read. It's not that the articles are bad, I just don't really agree with most of the articles. I know that most of the articles will advice on repaying debt as soon as possible and have more savings and stuff like that, which I don't really agree as we are not optimizing the money well enough. Having said so, I don't really mean that we should go and buy lots of stuff and then finally go into bankruptcy. In my opinion, one should really have the balance between debt and cash, in order to fully optimized the money to improve the lifestyle. In fact, a lot of affluent people have certain level of debts that they are comfortable with. To begin with, there are two kinds of debt, often called “good” debt and “bad” debt. Good debt is the ...