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.