Keep Your Broadband Receipts for Malaysian Tax Relief

This blog post is just to remind all of you (i.e. Malaysian only) to keep your broadband receipts (e.g. Streamyx, Maxis, P1-Wimax, PenangFON, and etc.) for tax relief starting from this year - 2010. This is based on one of the items (which I find them most useful) in 2010 Malaysia budget announcement.

Since this is new thing, I think many of you may still do NOT aware of this yet or may have just forgotten that you can claim up to RM500 for tax relief for 3 years - starting from 2010 to 2012.

What else receipts you should keep? Well, you probably have known already such as medical, sports, and book/magazine receipts. See my previous post for the summary: Tax Savings Tips for Malaysian.


By the way:

• Do you know you can have tax relief for buying a house too? Of course there are some conditions and the offer is until the end of this year, 2010.  However, it doesn't mean you must go for it which I discussed in my previous post - Tax Deduction for Property Purchase

• Do you know 60% of your premium of critical illness life insurance can have tax relief under the medical insurance policy? Of course for life insurance policy you can claim up to 100%. Many people do not aware this and for more detail, you can read my previous post - Tax Relief Tips for 36 Critical Illness Insurance.

Safest Way to Invest in Forex in Malaysia

In my previous post, I talked about whether one should invest in Renminbi (RMB) and one of the readers recommended us to buy AUD instead. Well, all these recommendations are good but always keep in mind that no investment is 100% guarantee. However, the purpose of this post is not going to tell whether you should invest in AUD, NZD or GBP but rather to share with you the safest and easiest way to invest in Forex in Malaysia.

The fact is there are so many Forex scams out there especially those offer the Forex trading. The funniest comment that I heard from a friend (I'm not sure if that is true) is when he wanted to sell, the system doesn't sell immediately but the rather delays it until the price is dropped. This happens almost every time we wanted to sell. At the end, he was always selling at lower prices and made a lost.

"Foreign Currency Fixed Deposit"

To me, the easiest and safest way to invest Forex in Malaysia is to open a "Foreign Currency Fixed Deposit" account from the local banks in Malaysia. I"m not sure if other banks offer this service (I assume yes - you can clarify that if I"m wrong) but Public Bank in Malaysia does offer this service. Yeah, I'm the fan of Public Bank...
 

Steps to Open a Foreign Currency Fixed Deposit Account in Public Bank

1. Go to "Public Bank" Office
2. Press "Customer Services" button and wait for your turn.
3. Once you're at the customer services desk, tell the banker that you would like to open a "Foreign Currency Fixed Deposit" account. Of course you need to tell her what currency you're interested in.
4. After that, the banker will ask you to queue at one of the front counters (e.g. counter 8) so that they can issue the foreign fixed deposit statement to you.
5. You will get something like this once everything is done:

Note: I choose auto reinvest the interest and auto renew the FD. You may also want to ask them whether there are any promotion before you decide. Sometimes they have promotion of putting 1 month of FD has higher rate than 12 months.  In that case, putting your FD in 1 month will earn more. By the way, minimum amount of investment is RM10K.

Summary

I think investing in Foreign Currency Fixed Deposit is the safest and easiest way to invest in Forex in Malaysia because it goes through official bank (although sometimes bank does play some tricks that seem to be like a scam). Another benefit of investing in Foreign FD is you will earn some interests out of your investment too.

So, wondering the easiest and safest way to invest in Forex in Malaysia? Just go to Public Bank...