SITI outsourced its ICT services for multi-billion ringgit

Shell IT International Sdn Bhd (SITI), the global ICT service delivery hub of the famous petrochemical conglomerates, is one of the pioneer tenant in Cyberjaya and provides thousands of job position for the ICT personnels around the area.

Last week, they announced a multi-billion ringgit outsourcing plan for the provision of its IT infrastructure and telecommunications services in 3 service bundles, starting July 1, 2008, to the 3 global IT and telecommunications suppliers namely AT&T, EDS and T-Systems. EDS has entered Cyberjaya with their own building for quite some times, while the other 2 are expected to enter into Cyberjaya in the near future following this deal with SITI.

AT&T will be taking care of SITI's network and telecommunications functions, while EDS handling their end user computing services including desktop, back-up and disaster recovery, and T-Systems looking after their hosting and storage.

My friends working in SITI informed that both their permanent and contractual staff have seen to be transferred to the outsourced company, and still working normally in their usual workplace. This is a very good arrangement as their job is not affected so much. Probably they have better career path too, as there will be opportunity to serve other global customers of their new employer.

All in all, this move is seen to be beneficial and is a win-win to everyone. In long run, following the presence of AT&T and T-Systems in Cyberjaya, there will be more ICT job opportunities in this MSC region. It was heard that EDS will expand their workforce in Cyberjaya after this deal too.

Is the car loan interest of 3% cheaper than house loan interest of 5%?

Many people are not aware that the interest calculation for car loan and house loan is different, so they cannot be compared directly figure by figure. If we compare the figure directly, is the car loan interest of 3% cheaper than house loan interest of 5%? You'll say 3% is definitely lower than 5%, right? However, the fact might be the other way round. 3% could be higher than 5%.

Let's do some calculation:

The total interest payable for a car loan of RM100k with interest 5% over a period of 9 years will be RM45,000. The monthly installment is RM1,342.60.

The total interest payable for a house loan of RM100k with interest 5% daily compounded over a period of 9 years will be RM24,439.20. The monthly installment is RM1,152.21.

The difference between the 2 calculations above is significant. Why? This is because car loan is calculated based on simple interest formula, and house loan is calculated based on amortized compound interest formula.

The formula for simple interest is straightforward, which is:

Interest = Principal x Rate x Years

What would be the car loan interest equilvalent to a house loan interest rate of 5%?

24,439.20 = 100,000 x Rate x 9
Rate = 2.72%

As a result, the above house loan interest rate of 5% is equilvalent to a car loan interest rate of 2.72%.

Is the car loan interest of 3% cheaper than house loan interest of 5% for the scenario above? The answer is obviously NO! However, there could be situation of the anwer to be yes too, especially when comparing a house loan of 30 years with a car loan of 9 years.

Here are some simple references for you:

For a 5 years 100k loan (the period where most people will take for car loan):
House loan interest of 4% = car loan interest of 2.10%
House loan interest of 5% = car loan interest of 2.65%
House loan interest of 6% = car loan interest of 3.21%
House loan interest of 7% = car loan interest of 3.77%
House loan interest of 8% = car loan interest of 4.35%
House loan interest of 9% = car loan interest of 4.93%


For a 9 years 100k loan (the maximum period for car loan):
House loan interest of 4% = car loan interest of 2.14%
House loan interest of 5% = car loan interest of 2.72%
House loan interest of 6% = car loan interest of 3.30%
House loan interest of 7% = car loan interest of 3.91%
House loan interest of 8% = car loan interest of 4.53%
House loan interest of 9% = car loan interest of 5.16%


For a 30 years 100k loan (the period where most people will take for house loan):
House loan interest of 4% = car loan interest of 2.40%
House loan interest of 5% = car loan interest of 3.12%
House loan interest of 6% = car loan interest of 3.87%
House loan interest of 7% = car loan interest of 4.67%
House loan interest of 8% = car loan interest of 5.49%
House loan interest of 9% = car loan interest of 6.35%

What to look for in a flexible home loan?

Several years ago, flexible home loan was a new concept contrary to the conventional home loan, offered by limited number of bank only. By today, many banks provide their so-called flexible home loan facility to the market. There was a saying that the interest rate of flexible home loans is slightly higher than their conventional counterparts, but this is no longer true nowadays, with both having the same competitive rate.

If you are considering a flexible home loan, what should you look for to distinguish the genuine flexible home loan from the rest?

Here are the basic features that any flexible home loan should mandate:

• Your loan account should linked to a deposit account, such as a current account. You get consolidated statement report for both accounts in one.
• You deposit money into the deposit account, and your monthly installment is automatically transferred from there to your loan account.
• The interest is calculated from outstanding loan amount minus any excess money in the deposit account. In other words, any extra money you deposit can really helps to reduce interest payments, thus saving you the money.
• You are flexible to deposit more than your monthly installment in any amount, anytime, and as often as you wish.
• No notice required or fees charged for the extra payment.
• You have the flexibility to withdraw your excess payments whenever you need it in any amount, anytime you wish.
• No notice required or fees charged for withdrawal of excess payments.
• Withdrawal of excess payments can be done anytime by ATM or cheque facility.
• You can start your principal repayments immediately even if your home is still under construction, rather than merely servicing the progressive interest.
• You can request for an increase in loan amount, giving you a ready avenue for extra money.

Any home loan that does not have ALL the features above, should not be considered as flexible home loan. If the loan imposes constraint or limit to the amount of payment and frequency to the deposit and/or withdrawal of excess money, then it is not flexible enough.

Other than the above basic features, you should also look for the loan with:

• Low interest rate, of course.
• No monthly, quarterly or annually maintenance fee.
• No processing fee for application.
• Subsidised lawyer fee.
• Subsidised valuation fee.
• Low lock-in period.
• Low termination fee.
• Daily rest interest calculation where interest is reduced as soon as payment is made.
• EPF withdrawal to reduce loan outstanding.
• Loyalty bonus in the form of lower interest rates or money rebates for customers who keep the account for years.
• No compulsory to MRTA/MLTA offered by the bank.
• Convenient to make payment easily.

Although you could hardly find a flexible home loan with all the features above, you can always look for the one that offers the most.

Reduce your home loan interest rate

For most people like me, home loan is our biggest borrowing in our lifetime that span for many years to settle off. The interest rate of our mortgage loan is a crucial factor that determine the amount of money and the repayment time we need to pay back to the bank.

Over the past few years, the interest rate offered by banks has been gradually dropping to historical low level, and is currently around 5%. Therefore, if your home loan interest rate is far higher than 5%, you should consider lowering it to tremendously save the cost and time for you to repay the bank. If you signed up your current home loan package by more than 3 years ago, there is a great possibility that your loan is bearing an interest rate of more than 6% (or higher than BLR-0.75% in other words) with the current Base Lending Rate of most banks in Malaysia standing at 6.75% now.

How to lower your interest rate? This is my advice.

The 1st attempt is to write a letter to the mortgage business manager of your bank, requesting for a reduction to your home loan interest rate with the bank. This is exactly what I did recently, and I received the reply from my bank 2 weeks after I sent out the letter to them, offering to reduce the interest rate 2% lower from the existing. Immediately, I saved a huge amount of money at the cost of just sending out a letter to the bank (cost of paper, ink, envelop and postal stamp, which is close to zero).

If your 1st attempt failed, either denied or ignored by the bank, the 2nd attempt is to refinance your home loan to another bank. I'm sure you can easily get an interest rate of below 5% with zero moving cost offered by another bank nowadays. There are plenty of such packages around.

Take out your home loan offer letter and check your interest rate now. You could save an amount of at least 5 figures RM of your hard earned money by this interest rate reduction attempt.

Insurance to the cards and cash in your wallet

I've been always afraid of loss, snatch, theft and fraud to those plastic cards and bank notes in my wallet. I'm sure you would be the same too.

I was introduced to the CPP card protection plan by a flyer that come together with my Citibank credit card statement about a year ago, and this plan have relieved me from such worry at the cost of only RM98 per year, with the protection extends to my family members too.

The CPP plan enables me to have a single point of contact to cancel all my lost or stolen cards with just one phone call to their call center. Beside credit cards, its protection also covers bank ATM cards, MyKad, driving license, passport, Touch'n Go card, cash, and the wallet itself.

It provides protection to credit card fraud case even before notification to bank, and of course also after notification. It will also provide reimburstment for the replacement cost of the cards and valuable documents.

Click here to view the list of features and benefits of CPP.

Besides Citibank, CPP's protection policy is currently available locally for credit card holders from Alliance Bank, CIMB Bank, Standard Chartered Bank and Hong Leong Bank too. The plan and annual fees might varies a bit from each of the banks.

You can probably find out more about this protection plan from your bank.

Make your house stays cool - the cheaper and effective way

Being an equatorial country, the weather here in Malaysia is damn hot, especially when there is no raining for some times. The temperature in our house can easily gone up to more than 30 degree Celsius during daytime, and remains there for many hours at night before cooling off. Even since I moved to my linked house, I had been wondering what would be the best solution to lower down the temperature in the house, so that I could save on electricity bills by using the air-cons lesser. Since the heat comes from the sun, I focused on solutions on top of the ceiling. In the HOMEDEC Expo, I found vendor selling reflective sheets to be laid down on top of the ceiling, and also insulating material to be laid down in the same manner. But the cost is a bit high. In addition, the developer of my house already laid a layer of aluminium sheet underneath the roof tiles of my house, but I could still feel the heat. Therefore, I doubted on the effectiveness of those methods. I continued searching... 2 years ago, I found another vendor showcased their product with a mobile booth in South City selling turbine ventilators to be installed on roof top. I've seen those ventilators before, and convinced by its features and price. The temperature in my house always stays below 30 degree Celsius after the installation. It works!  

The Turbine Ventilators 

 

One Of The Air Vents 

This ventilation system consists of:

• 2x aluminium wind turbine 16" in diameter turning 24x7 on free floating system
• 8x air vents installed on ceiling

And the total cost of ownership is RM1,196 inclusive installation and 10 years warranty. (If your house land area is small, you could install only 1 turbine with 4 air vents at half the cost. Each turbine is effective to cover area of 500 square feets.)

So, what are its features that have convinced me?

• It is designed to turn at the slightest air movement, expelling warm air and ventilating the whole house continuously 24x7x365.
• It keeps the house cool by natural air movement, operates dynamically and does not use any electricity.
• Even in a windless day, hot air rises from the house will work to turn the turbines.
• It is designed to deflect water, making the system leak-proof to rain water.
• It has high speed limiting mechanism to prevent the turbine throat from blown away by strong wind.
• It is totally maintenance free. Its teflon impregnated bearing does not need to be oiled and working soundlessly all the time.

The brand of my turbine ventilators is Denko, distributed by Taika Enterprise. The vendor's booth is mobile in several hybermarkets. Sometimes I saw them in Tesco too.

Have you LinkedIn?

I tend to ignore those email invitations asking to join social networking sites such as Facebook, Friendster, Hi5, etc. Those sites give me the impression that they are for the youngsters looking for dating partners and/or sharing living photos, and somehow don't catch much interest to a married person who have already left the university campus for years like me.

Until recently, I received an email from a friend who is about my age of thirty plus, and well known to be serious at work, inviting me to join his network in LinkedIn. Out of curiousity, I signed in, and I Linked In.

LinkedIn really makes a different and unique from most other social networking sites, as it is targetted to working people in the business and professional groups. There, I found people I know at work and linked to them. I found those executive recruiters who had contacted me and matched the jobs for me before. I also found my schoolmates and got to know their latest whereabout with their trail of C.V. after leaving school. I could also find those famous people in the industries and professional areas. In summary, this site is about contacts, relationships and opportunities focusing on business and career.

After I sent out some invitation to my contacts to link with me, I found that many are new to LinkedIn and just created their account following my invitation to them. I wonder, have you Linked In or interested to get Linked In?

Disclosure policy

This policy for the blog of The 8th Voyager is valid from 02 April 2008.



I hereby disclose that:

This blog is a personal blog solely written and edited by me. While most of the time I write for my own purposes, this blog does accept forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation.

This blog abides by word of mouth marketing standards. I believe in honesty of relationship, opinion and identity. The compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog. That content, advertising space or post will be clearly identified as paid or sponsored content.

Unless specifically and explicitly declared and disclosed, most of the time the owner of this blog is not compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. Even though the owner of this blog might receive compensation for my posts or advertisements, I always give my honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experiences on those topics or products. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the blogger's own. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider or party in question.

This blog does not contain any content which might present a conflict of interest, other than some stock counters listed in Bursa Malaysia which discussed in the blog may be part of my own investment portfolio.


To get your own policy, go to http://www.disclosurepolicy.org/

About The 8th Voyager

I view everybody's life as an interesting voyage from infant to old age. We shall experience many things throughout the journey.

I set up this blog to share out what I have experienced, what I observed, what I heard, what I thought, what I did, ... that might be beneficial or useful to you. I believe knowledge and information sharing is the beauty of the Internet, and I have benefited a lot from it. We can find clues and solutions from the Internet for most of the puzzles we face along our voyage eversince the emergence of the virtual world of Internet, and I decided to contribute some to the community that have been contributed much more to me.

I name this blog as The 8th Voyager, simply because there are other Voyagers entered into this space before me, and have registered for their presence. I am Voyager No. 8.

Bon voyage!!

Contact Me