Langkawi Trip (June School Holidays)

It was the school holidays (A dated post as the trip was a year back) and we decided to bring our whole family for a trip to Langkawi. We have been to Bali, Phuket and Bintan frequently and have also been to Krabi and Hua Hin once. So we decided to give Langkawi a shot this time round. It is a regional beach destination that is not on our conquered list yet. We hope it will be a perfect destination for our family trip after a few misses due to either too expensive air ticket prices or it was simply just not on the top of our pecking order

We started doing our research over tripadvisor and on whatever related websites we could come across through google search. We finally decided to stay in the Berjaya Resorts which have a 4 star rating through the overall reviews. We booked a rainforest view room as the sea-facing seems great but we have small kids, so it is better be on the cautious side.

We booked a Silkair flight and off we go on the first week of June for a 4 days 3 nights trip. Upon arrival in Langkawi Airport which took us around 1.5 hours, we are all ready to explore the beautiful island of Langkawi.. 

Once you reach the baggage reclaim area after clearing the customs, there are lots of car rental companies that are soliciting  for your business. We rented a car from one of the counters and after some slight bargaining, I manage to get a Proton Wira for around 70 ringgit per day with a 50 ringgit deposit. It is highly advisable to rent a car to self drive in order to fully explore Langkawi based on our recent experience. The roads are not congested, so it makes driving a breeze.

Based on my own observation, there are 4 main areas in Langkawi to explore and they are A) Berjaya area (it is where my hotel is located), B) Cenang Area (it is where the hype is, just like Patong in Phuket), C) Kuah Town (this is the city center) and D) Eastern Northern Side of the Island (They have some interesting places to visit such as the black sand beach and a waterfall. I have attached a tourist map and highlighted the areas for you to have a better idea.

 

 

 

Here is a summary of things to look out for:

 

1) Berjaya Hotel  have a nice thai restaurant which you have to reserve through the concierge and there is also a natural walk conducted at 6-6.30pm around the hotel compounds which is kind of interesting. The beach at Berjaya Hotel is really nice and when the sunlight rays are strong, the water are almost blue just like in the Mediterranean sea.

 

2) Cenang area might be a better choice to stay for those who are not into nature and more into street food and shopping.

 

3) There is a shopping center at the middle of Cenang, you could get good tour tickets over there whereby our island hopping price was around 25 ringgit per pax versus the quoted 50 ringgit elsewhere. Also, they have the most decent toilet but it cost around 2 ringgit per entry if I recall correctly. Finally, it is a good place to chill as it is the location with good air conditioning.

 

4) There is a cable car attraction to a mountain whereby I find it is kind of overhyped as there is basically nothing much to do apart from 2 small cafes once you are up in the mountain. Nonetheless, you can soak in the great scenery.

 

5) In Kuah Town, the must see will be the huge eagle monument. There are lots of factory outlets but it is more the chocolates, tidbits and kitchen ware that are worth a look at.

 

6) For car parks, just have to be creative and there are actually lots of spots to do creative parking.

 

To sum up, it is ok but not compelling enough to warrant a second visit.

 

 

Lee

 

 

 

Dollar and Cents- Renovating a House (Choosing of House Furnishing and Accessories)

It had been a hectic time as I have just moved to my new residence. I have moved four times so far in my life and moving is really tiring and stressful while managing all the logistics. Hopefully this will be my final home where I can retire in, provided it does not get en-bloc.

As promised in my previous blog post, I will be sharing my experience of the renovation process and the purchasing of the different accessories and home furnishing. Sad to say, the renovation id that we got did not perform as expected. We have moved in for about 2 weeks but the carpentry works are still in progress. So we are basically still living on boxes as our consoles and wardrobes are still not up.

Lately, we have been busy sourcing out for the different home accessories. I would say we have more or less got what we wanted. Here are the list of vendors we purchased from and perhaps it could prove helpful to those who are in the midst or intending to do a renovation.

Aircon
Twin City Engineering Pte Ltd

We choose this company from the recommendation of our id and we did some price comparison with Gain City and Coolserve. Their prices are reasonable from the different quotes. We pay around $5000 for a system 4 Mitsubishi Electric whereby we change all the pipes and all pipes are concealed. We were deciding between Mitsubishi Electric and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries but choose Mitsubishi Electric after doing some on-line research.

Curtains
MGL Curtains

We were deciding between D Zander which is the sponsor for Xiaxue home curtains and MGL. MGL won us over as they have the fabrics that we want. Jimmy Textile in Katong seems to offer reasonably priced curtains too but we were to lazy to go over to do some comparison. We get MGL to do a wall paper, one set of master bedroom day and night curtains and three window blinds for the bedrooms and living room, we spend around 1700 dollars.

Kids Beds and Table
Piccolo House

We search quite a while for the furniture of our children's rooms. Piccolo House was our final choice as we feel their finishing and pricing are better.

Kitchen and Toilet Accessories
Adamas and GR Link

We kind of regret hacking away the toilet bowls as it seems to be of the Toto brand. Ironically, we got back the same brand and Adamas in Jalan Besar offered around 30% discount off the list price whereby the main Toto distributor, W.Atelier, offered around 20% discount. It set us back around 1200 dollars for two wc plus a Toto rain-shower set at 700 plus. A more high end Baron or Aquino wc would cost around 300 to 350 each while a less branded rain-shower set could cost between 200-450 region.

GR Link generally offered reasonable price for toilet and kitchen accessories whereby we got some of our stuff there too. The shop beside GR Link is also worth a look at.

Kitchen Stove, Oven and Hob
Mayer and Lion City Trading

We got a package which comes to around 1000 dollars for stove, hob and oven from Ariston which had got good reviews as compared to similar priced brands such as EF.

We got our build in microwave oven from Lion City Trading which offers pretty good deals.

Lighting
BL Lighting

We settled on BL Lighting (Jalan Besar) 5 inch LED downlight at 39 dollars each with 2 years warranty. The lights quality are pretty good. The normal non LED downlight would have cost around 26 dollars.

Store Room Racks 
Yee Sin

We got our bomb shelter storage racks form Yee Sin and they do have it in all white racks. I guess it looks more pleasing to the eyes.

Hope this list will be helpful for your renovation process.

Lee

Dollar and Cents- Renovating a House (Choosing Interior Designers and Contractors)

It has been a long while since my last post as I was away to France for a free and easy tour with my family which I will try to do a posting on it. Also, I am currently doing my renovation for my new apartment.

I hope to share my experience for the renovation process so others could perhaps benefit from it and be able do a better budgeting with cost savings in mind.

Before the renovation and short-listing of interior designers and contractors for our home, I have been religiously buying the Home and Decor magazines and also browse the other interior design magazines in the petrol kiosk rack since the start of the year to get ideas for our home. We also google and research on the web whereby renotalk and hardwarezone forums were very useful. There are also individual blogs such as those of Xiaxue and there is one which is really good whereby he actually went to around 10 interior designing firms to get a quote (I can't recall off hand his blog address but will upload it if I managed to find it). Along the way, my wife and I started to short-list those designers that we kind of have a good feel  from their portfolio showcase in the magazines and reviews from the web.

We ended up with a final list of 3 Interior Designing firms (1 is from the magazine approach, 1 is introduced by a client and another is my wife's contact) and 1 contractor (Recommendation by a friend).

This is the short-list of things we wanted to do:

1) Hack 3 walls and erect 3 new walls
2) Overlay Kitchen floor tiles and walls tiles
3) New wardrobe for master bedroom and two other rooms.
4) 2.2m full height console
5) 2m full height console for master bedroom
6) Hack master bedroom toilet and total overhaul
7)Overlay floor tiles for common bathroom
8)False Ceiling for Master Bedroom and Son's Bedroom
9)Polish marble floor, parquet and common toilet marble walls.
10)Custom made shelving and study table for son's room.
11) Custom made study table with shelving in master bedroom.
12) Kitchen Cabinets and a standalone cabinet for built in microwave and built in oven.
13) Electrical Works
14)Painting
15)Vanity top and mirror cabinet for common bathroom with a new shower screen

There were some good ideas suggested by the Interior Designers that we have met especially the one that was introduced by my client whom is very experienced in the business. We got quotes from all of them whereby the contractor came in with the lowest quote and we were tempted to pass the project to him as my friend have rave reviews of his work. However, my friend just did his kitchen and not the whole house.

We decided to go with my wife's contact at the end cause we feel an interior designer might be able to execute our theme better. Moreover, his rates are reasonable and not way off the contractor quote. As for the other Interior Designers, their quotes could be around 30-50 percent more than the quote I got from the interior designer that we went with.

Partly, they are from a more reputable interior designing  firm which means they do charge 7% GST which my current interior designer and the contractor does not charge as he just started his own company for around 3 years. This could be quite a lot of cost savings which you can utilise to make another wardrobe or for your furniture budget.

That's all for now and I will carry on with further posts on my renovation process. We are in the midst of buying the appliances, furniture, curtains and etc.

Lee

Parenthood Rebate for Self Employed

This has been a scheme that have been around for a few years but I did not really knew about it till I was browsing through the CPF website a few years back.

This basically allows you to claim up to 3 days of parenthood child care leave from the government. We are granted 6 parenthood child care leave per annum but the government is only going to pay for 3 days. The awareness of this scheme is basically more applicable for those self employed. For those employed, your HR department will handle the claim.

The limit you can claim per day is $500. You can go to the CPF website and under the self employed section, you should be able to find the on-line claim for parenthood child care leave.

For self employed, other things to take note is to try to contribute to your SRS and CPF to reduce your tax liabilities which have been widely covered. For your CPF, you can use it finance your house mortgage payments so I don't see any huge disadvantage in contributing.

As for SRS, you can use it to buy blue chips stocks or unit trust and would be a good supplement to your retirement fund.

The current cap for CPF contribution for self employed is around $30,000 and for SRS will be around $11,500.

Lee

Beware of Leveraged and Representative Exchange Traded Funds

With the evolution of the ETFs  market, they now covered numerous products and varieties. You are able to go long or short and you are able to take a leverage position of up to 3X. There is even a Bitcoin ETF in the making.

Most of the interesting ETFs are listed in the US markets whereby some are seriously just not suitable for the normal retail investors due to their structure.

The advantages of the ETFs have been widely preached with empirical studies showing most fund managers are not able to out-beat the market. So a passive approach with lower management fees and expense fees would be considered a more effective way of getting exposure to the markets. However, with the sales charges of most unit trust being cut to close to 0.5%-0.75% and if you chance upon a promotion, it could be even zero percent.

So this brings unit trust to be on a more level playing field. The spread of ETFs plus the brokerage commission could be equivalent to the 0.5%-0.75%. This brings it in line with the sales charge of unit trust. So the only thing that ETFs stand out will be the management fee which usually gives it an edge of around 0.5%-1% per annum.

However, some of us would not mind paying the extra in the quest to find the next Warren Buffet or Peter Lynch whom are able to give us market beating returns.

ETFs are mainly divided into replication and representative types. Replication types usually will buy the physical underlying to replicate the performance of the markets. On the other hand, Representative types are usually structured using derivatives products.

For those who are dealing with Representative ETFs and with added leverage feature, you have to be "Ready to Trade" rather than have a "Buy and Hold mentality". Most Representative ETFs make use of futures products to create a proxy for the underlying. Most futures exhibit Contango characteristics which means longer term futures contract are trading at a higher price than shorter term futures contracts which are usually traded as they are the most liquid.

So whenever the shorter term contracts expired, the ETFs managers would have to roll over to the next contract which they have to get at a higher price so it will lead to an erosion of the Net Asset Value since he can only buy fewer contracts. If you add leverage to the picture, it is definitely not an exciting proposition for buy and hold investors.

Citing an example, Ultra Short Vix ETF (UVXY) which has a leverage of 2X and was trading at around $11-$12 when Vix was near their range low of around 12 in Febuary 2013. Recently, VIX is back to around the 12 level and the same ETF is trading at around $3.5 (Not taking into consideration the 10 for 1 consolidation). Enough Said I Guess.

To conclude, for buy and hold investors, just stick to the normal replication ETFs with no leverage. For those into leverage and representative ETFs, do take it as a trading instrument which I personally will not hold for more than a month, unless it is moving in sync with your intended direction.

Lee