Investments worth keeping

In the name of diversification, I've been exploring and investing in a number of different investment types for the past few years.  They are giving me returns that range from 3% to more than 50% in extremely rare occasions and especially if they were having campaigns and promotions.    In my opinion, the main challenge to these investment instruments is that our EPF is giving good return, which make those giving lower than that unattractive.  After these years of trials and errors, I've resorted to keeping only the following in my investment portfolio for the moment.

• A savings account that still gives 5% profit rate p.a. since introductory promotion.  However, maximum deposit amount is kept at RM2k with no overall quota.  Good enough for emergency fund.
• A trading account with a broker that I've been with for more than 20 years.  I don't actively trade and some of the stocks are meant for investment rather than trading.  I just leave it open and active.  At least whenever I see opportunities in the market and feel like taking the chances, I have the means to do so.  In short, it can potentially give higher returns than EPF, but loss is also a possibility too.
• Another trading account-cum-savings because it is giving some 3+% p.a. on idle money in the account.  If no cash upfronted, it would act just like the other trading account above.
• A crowdfunding (debt funding) account that is currently giving around 7% p.a. return.  However, with each default, the rate can significantly drop and lately, the number of defaults is growing, hence my venture into another one below.  If I choose to only fund guaranteed debts, the nett return rate would be around 5.95%, which is still competitive.
• Another crowdfunding account that I opened due the degrading performance of the above.  At the moment, it is giving me a nett 6.3% return p.a. with defaults still standing at zero.  I also have one crowdfunding account here in Saudi that is giving up to 15% p.a. nett returns.
• Two trust fund accounts for me to experiment with unit trusts.  There are loss risks of course, but one fund subscribed last year is currently recording 70% unrealised return.  Should liquidate this soon.  Don't be greedy.
• A few FD accounts here in Saudi because FDs here are still giving around 4.5% to 5% return rates p.a.

Any other investments that are giving lower RoR p.a. than the above, in my opinion, are not worth keeping.  How much capital that I put in each?  That is not something that I want to share 😀

How much do I passively make a month? A snapshot.

When I talked about getting my money to work for me, I really mean it.  Ever since, I will always look for investment opportunities that will make my money work harder and harder for me.  From time to time, I also rearrange my investment portfolio in order to optimise the returns.  

After some time, I think it would be interesting to know how hard the money has worked for me 😁.  I summarise my investment portfolio in the table below without the capital of course just to get some idea on how much, at least, I am getting a month.

Since this post is not sponsored, I will keep the investment names hidden.  This is not my complete portfolio.  I only include investments that guarantee returns (realised) here and exclude those that fluctuate (unrealised) and those that do not credit returns monthly e.g. EPF & ASNB.  Also, all of these investments are shariah compliant.

Name	Description	Profit in January 2026
V	Micro-investment platform	RM29.40
FS	Crowdfunding (debt funding) started in 2024	RM319.00
C	Another crowdfunding started last year	RM111.22
B	Similar to V.  It is also giving 3x bonus points that are convertible to cash, and the profit here has taken that into calculation	RM73.74
ARM	Savings account that is giving > 2% p.a. profit	RM11.08
TG	Can be considered as a savings account that is giving > 2% p.a. profit and credited daily	RM50.66
AM	Savings account with promotional profit rate of > 2% p.a.	RM26.35
K	Savings account with promotional profit rate of > 2% p.a.	RM9.60
ARB 1	Savings account that gives > 2% p.a. returns and credited daily	SAR46.93
STC	Savings account that is currently having promotion and giving > 2% p.a. returns	SAR117.52
ARB 2	FD that matures in 3 months and I've started this more than 3 months ago and now consistently getting return every month.	SAR306.25
Total		1,101.75

Alhamdulillah.  The data have it that I did make more than 1k last month.  Though only slightly more.  More than enough to settle the monthly bills.

A bitter reality of unit trust funds

Maybank launched goal-based investment (GBI) about a year ago.  It is basically unit trust funds based investment where you can combine a number of trust funds in one group, determine the percentage of each, put on a fixed amount of money and Maybank will do the purchase.  I decided to try and created a goal comprising the following funds.  The idea is, since we have to put aside RM270/month for our children’s takaful premium that we pay annually, maybe I can try to generate something from the cumulative amount before we actually use it a year later.  After the creation, I started RCA-ing this fund on monthly basis until it reached a point where I decided to stop.  The main reason is that the performance of the fund kept declining and I was concerned that we were going to lose even more.  I put the remaining into a safer investment instrument.

Stopped RCA-ing in February 2025

Only recently it started to show growth and is giving positive return, which is just nice because it’s about time we have to pay for the annual premium.  I finally closed this goal on 10th July 2025 with RM6.60 loss.  A margin that I can tolerate and can be covered by the profit from the remaining amount that I put somewhere else after I stopped RCA-ing.  I’m now looking at another instrument to start another year of RCA.

One year experience with Funding Societies

In the search for an alternative investment instrument that can potentially gives higher returns than the EPF, I stumbled upon Funding Societies.  Crowdsourcing was one of my research areas, so it is not that difficult for me to understand the mechanisms behind it.  The experience is not bad at all.  In a year, I’ve managed to gain more than RM2k returns from a total of RM 50k capital that I gradually increased from few hundreds initially.  As of today, my annualised profit rate is 8.8%.

Returns growth to date.

However, like any other investment types, it is not without risk.  The risk is when the issuers (SME companies that make loans) default payment.  The Funding Societies team will do the necessary and take appropriate actions if that happens and we will be informed.  Nothing we can do beyond that.  Fortunately, for me, all such issues have been resolved.

My practice is to balance between guaranteed loans and non-guaranteed loans.  The former has lower profit rate (but still higher than most other instruments) but repayments are guaranteed.  For non-guaranteed loans, I will take time to go through the factsheets before investing.  I will only invest in companies that have excellent (prompt) repayment track records.  This will help to reduce defaults, although there is no guarantee.  My advice is to avoid setting the auto-investment bots, unless for guaranteed loans. 

How to avoid unit trust’s sales charge?

If you’re used unit trust investment, you will notice that there is sales charge that comes with its subscription, usually deducted from the total amount.  That means, the number of units are purchased after deducting this charge from the total amount invested.  The sales charge can range from 1.5% to 3%, which can be significant if you are investing a large amount.

I recently found a trick to skip this charge.  Very simple.  Purchase the unit trusts via KWSP (EPF) i-Invest feature.  EPF allows its contributors to use up to 30% of their Account 1 (now Retirement Account) balance for the purpose of unit trust investment.  Based on my experience so far, there is no minimum amount required and all unit trusts purchased so far via -Invest are free of any sales charges.

If you’re concerned about using up your EPF savings, fret not because you can always voluntarily contribute up to RM100k/year to make up for the ‘lost’.  One of the cons that I can think of is that, you are limited to the list of funds that EPF has approved i.e. funds that are regarded as safe.  These usually exclude the high-risk-high-return ones.

Mission 1300

This is another challenge that I’ve created to keep my brain working.  I have SAR1k that I want to keep in my multi-currency account.  Sadly, it only accepts deposit in RM.  So I had to sell the SAR first before I can keep it in the account.  I sold the SAR1k and was paid RM1220 based on the exchange rate at the time.  Now, I want to buy back the SAR1k and of course I won’t be able to get it with RM1220 due to the spread.  At the current rate, I will need around RM1300 to buy SAR1k, hence the mission.  That is about RM80 or 6.5% more.  Can I possibly get it without using my own money?

Fortunately, there is a number of options nowadays for investments that offer high liquidity i.e. that allows you to withdraw anytime, as early as T+1.  I tried and compared three options.  The newly launched Maybank goal-based investment (GBI) and Halogen crypto currency-based fund (subscribe here), and a regular savings account that offers 3.88% p.a. profit.  GBI is like a portfolio comprising a maximum of five funds that you can choose and determine their respective percentages.  Most importantly, all of them, at the time of writing, are free of any subscription/sales charges.

 

Option	Buy date	Buy price (RM)	Sell date	Sell price (RM)	Return (RM)
GBI	13/05/2024	1220	31/05/2024	1249.33	29.33 👎
Halogen	15/05/2024	1220 (NAV 1.2048)	31/05/2024	1557.61 (NAV 1.5382)	337.61 👍
Savings	15/05/2024	1220	31/05/2024	1221.94	1.94 👎

Halogen is therefore clearly the winner in this case at this time around and managed to meet my target.  I finally bought the SAR1k happily ever after at RM1292.20.

RM24k challenge

Hi,

It’s all about money and wealth portfolio growth now that I don’t have much else to think about during my spare time.  What would you do if you are offered a free loan to be paid back in six interest free installments?  With no upfront charges nothing.  Sounds too good to ignore although I’m not in the need of one at the moment.

Maybank recently launched the triple offers, one of which is the EzyCash-i i.e. the free loan mentioned above.  Not sure how they will benefit from this.  May be in the hope that people default repayments, resulting in interests :). Just a guess.  Based on my available credit limit, I can get around RM24k.  Should I grab the offer, at the very least, I can put it in a savings account that bears no less than 3.8% profit p.a.  Based on my rough calculation, that’ll give me some RM320.29 (1.36%) upon the last repayment, which is better than not doing and getting anything.

However, I have wilder idea that will allow me to have more than that after the last repayment :p. It’s not without risk though.  Let’s see.  I will update you on this six months from now, Insya-Allah.

Getting your money to work for you …

Today, I am going to talk about getting our hard earned money work harder for us.  Basically, make it get more money for us.  Of course you earn something by just leaving it in your savings account somewhere.  But how much can we get?  At most 1% per year but most of the time, the rate is a lot lower than that.

We can invest more actively in stocks for example, but as we know, the risk is higher and it takes time for you to get the rythm and start making money.  Another not so passive, low risk option is by taking advantage of banks various campaigns and promotions as they compete to attract potential customers/investors.  For this, you may want to do your own research or subscribe to portals that can do this for you such as RinggitPlus.

Here is one example that I can share with you.  Let’s assume that you have RM10,000 available for passive, low risk investment.  If you just leave it in your savings account that gives 0.25% return, you will get RM25 after a year.  Early this year, I found two attractive offers.  Al Rajhi Islamic savings account* that gives 4% return, which is extremely rare and RHB Islamic fixed deposit* that gives 3.8% return after six months.  The former offer lasts for only three months from 1 January 2024 to 31 March 2024 and the later for two months from 31 January 2024 to 31 March 2024.

*Link may not work after promotion ends

What we can do in this case is to put the RM10,000 into Al Rajhi account for the first three full months from 1 January to 31 March that will yield RM99.45 return (4% x 10,000 / 366 x 91 days).  Withdraw the 10k from the savings account on 31 March and put it into the RHB fixed deposit that will give you RM191.04 (3.8% x 10,000 / 366 x 184 days) upon maturity after six months.  You will get a total of RM290.49 after nine months, which is equivalent to 3.87% per year.  You still have three more months after that to look for somewhere else for your money to work for you.  The return is certainly more than the RM25 or RM100 if you manage to get savings account that gives 1% return.

This option is of course if, for some reasons, you have ruled out ASB and EPF.

Some words of advice though, if the offer sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  Don’t be greedy.  Stick to only known and verified financial institutions.