Impact of Malaysia GST to Investors

Malaysia is expected to implement Goods and Services Tax (GST) on 1 April 2015 at the initial rate of 6%. The cost of a lot of things will be affected, including investment vehicles and products.

I believe nowadays everybody deals with banks. How the GST will impact our deposit, interest, loan, credit card, bank charges, etc.? Refer to the table below.

The next of our concerns is our investment in the local stock market and unit trust funds. The brokerage and clearing fee will be affected, but not the stamp duty. The impact on unit trust funds is more severe, so your fund manager has to work much more harder to bring you a good profit after minus all the charges and fees and now the additional GST imposed.

How about insurance policies? Your premium paid to life and education policies will not be imposed with GST, but it seems that most if not all other insurance policies are affected. Note that general insurance products including car insurance, house/fire insurance, accident insurance, etc. will be affected too.

For those who invest in precious metals (gold, silver), jewellery, collectibles, etc., if you trade with the physical product, you are affected.

If you trade with a gold/silver investment account with a bank without touching on the physical product, you are probably not affected.

A 6% GST of PAMP Suisse 100g gold bar selling at RM14,000 will be RM840, quite a big sum.

Sending my kid to learn WeiQi (Go) at N-World Go Academy

WeiQi (a.k.a. Go, 围棋) is a kind of strategic chess game originated from ancient China.

I just found out that there is a WeiQi academy for kids called N-World, operated by a small team of young people. They have classroom in Setapak and Puchong.

They offered a trial class, and my son seems to like it. Therefore, we signed him up for the WeiQi lesson, which we believe will provide good training to his brain as well as personality.

If you are also interested in N-World Go Academy, here is their Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/NworldGo.