Tag: Unemployment

RM278 monthly for retirement sounds good?

Recently I saw a friend of mine quit his job to take care of his ailing father. He had a pretty stable job. Probably brought back a good RM7-RM8 thousands a month with his job then. He’s the sole breadwinner. He will be going back to Batu Pahat Johor to live with his father. He will be taking his wife and his 2 sons with him. His father was too old to be living alone and his father just don’t want to live with him in Selangor. It’s not our culture to send old people to old folks home hence as a good son he is, he moved his home to Batu Pahat and lives with his dad. He earned a living by driving for Grab while doing some odd jobs here and there.

This situation is not at all uncommon. We find there’s more and more people living with their mom and dad. And this doesn’t look like it will change any time soon. According to the data shared by Employee Provident Funds, on average contributors who are aged between 50-54 only have RM200 thousands in their account. What’s worse, 67% of these folks have less than RM50 thousands in their accounts. The rich have so much money it inflated EPF average number for that age bracket. That’s very very worrying.

Table from 2018 EPF Annual Report. It’s scary looking at them.

Let’s assume that many of these old folks will indeed retire with RM50 thousands in the bank. Let’s further assume that these vintage folks will continue to live for another 15 years as Malaysia’s life expectancy is indeed 75 years old.

What can RM50 thousands give you over 15 years? That’s about RM278 a month. How much does a pensioner needs to live nowadays? This is what EPF shared.

That’s right folks, for a vintage couple, they need about RM3,100 or RM1,500 per person in a month. Probably more if they live in Klang Valley, Penang or JB. In 5-10 years, those in the age bracket with about RM50 thousands in their EPF account vintage folks will retire with only RM278 monthly income. That is if they don’t spend it at one go for umrah or pay up their housing or personal loan upfront. Even if we have double of that amount, RM1000 a month is not a lot.

Why am I sharing this? Because, where we are headed at our current rate, it’ll be way way worse than this. Lots of the folks in their 30s and 40s are still paying for student debt (PTPTN), fresh graduates have upwards of RM40 thousand in student loan alone. Most will have taken personal loan for marriage (I took out RM15 thousands loan for my marriage back in 2005. Then there’s car loan and credit card outstanding balances and many other loans probably.

We may ended up not having anything saved for out retirement. If we are part of the 67% of people that have less than RM50 thousands in our accounts by the time we are 50 years old then we need a miracle to be able to retire comfortably.

Remember that current adults and later our kids will not have it easy either. Even now people in their twenties are having a hard time to make enough money for themselves. Fresh graduates are doing menial jobs and paid at just slightly above minimum wage of RM1400. These are salary for folks working in fast food joints and restaurants. They don’t even have enough for themselves. More than 60% of graduates are unemployed in the first year after graduation. In total there are more than 500,000 adults are unemployed in the country. We don’t need statistics to tell us if these are younger folks or older folks.

So let’s be better prepared with our finances to better take care of our parents. Be better to prepare our kids so they fared better in the economy. Be prepared so we retired comfortably and won’t burden our parents nor our kids nor their kids.

If we aren’t prepared, we will be living with our kids later, together with their kids and their kids’ kid all in the same home. Singapore folks seemed to be ready and way ahead of us for this, for better or worse.

Peace be unto all.

Between the Picky and the Prick

I was reading the news recently and came across this article from The Star. It’s our Human Resource Minister Kulasegaran saying, “As I am speaking, currently there are more than 640,000 job openings available. Not just the 3D (Dirty, Dangerous, Difficult) jobs, for example at the management level there more than 6,000; for professionals more than 21,000; as well as technical and associate professionals for more than 22,000.” He added “The biggest challenge for us is there are a lot of employment opportunities, but the youth are not willing to take these jobs.” Bold font emphasis is mine.

He was answering a question by DS Ismail Yaakob (BN-Bera) on the ministry to state whether the Pakatan Harapan government will be able to implement its election manifesto of creating one million job opportunities by the end of its five-year term.

First of all, if we add the management level, technical and professional jobs, it’s not even 10% of the 640k jobs available. Does it means the rest are all 3D jobs? Why do you like give half-assed answers that opens up your backside Minister?

This is why I hate our half-assed politician and minister. They think they are so good and performed well enough when in actual fact it’s far from what it should be. Let’s take a closer look at your ministry.

Here’s the Human Resource Ministry mission statements I took from https://www.mohr.gov.my.

Clearly, in the mission statements you wanted to “Increase employability and employment rate of the local workforce to meet the national labour market needs”. So it’s not just jobs creation, but also getting these unemployed youth to get jobs. Now, if what this prick said is true, that we have more than 640K jobs available and that 150K of those jobs were created within the year. We would’ve significantly reduced unemployment rate already by now because back in March, I remember our unemployed people in the country are in the range of 500k. So let’s take a look at the latest unemployment rate by the Department of Statistics Malaysia.

Unemployment rate has remained flat since the beginning of the year. – DOSM

So there you go you Minister Prick. You have done nothing so far. You can add even a million jobs and if the unemployment rate doesn’t change you can forget it. It’s just like increasing minimum wage, you can increase minimum wage to a hundred thousand a month. If the purchasing power doesn’t increase, you can forget it.

Now look, I’m a reasonable person, if he doesn’t stop at saying our youth are picky and continued to acknowledge that the ministry hasn’t done enough to either educate these picky youth or create more jobs that suit the youth and these are the things we are doing to fix that, then I’m okay. It means he understands that there are still more things that he needs to do. Then again, only a minister with a big cojones will acknowledge that he/she still have a lot to do. This particular minister, this particular prick? Not so much.

I have said before that youth nowadays have mismatched expectations when it comes to jobs. This is not something new, we all know this. You know this, Minister Prick knows this, I know this. So instead of saying the same thing over and over again, Minister Prick, you need to work on getting it resolved.

Another thing, you don’t get to say it out loud that youth are picky. You haven’t even done anything significant yet, so you haven’t earned the right to say it. Don’t for a second think you can be like Dr. Mahathir, he has earned the right. He can say Malays are lazy or whatever the heck he wants. He has earned it. You Minister Prick, haven’t. We the rakyat, get to say whatever we want because we put you in office. Remember why we put you in office? To solve the damn problem.

So start working on getting it resolved, stop telling us youth are picky because you are such a prick for saying it.

So, don’t be one.

Peace be unto you.