Building a Retirement Fund in Malaysia

I am 29 years old this year. My parents already retired as government servants and enjoying their sweet retirement life with pensions by the government. This makes me think about what would my retirement life looks like after I retired. Unfortunately, I am not a government servant, and hence not eligible for the Malaysian Government pension that seems lucrative to me.

The Malaysian Government Pension

Pension given by the Malaysia Government is quite yummy if you have worked in the government sector for a long period. The pension fund is provided by KWAP (Kumpulan Wang Persaraan), Malaysia's largest public service pension fund which involves in diversified investment activities, manages fund collection, and provides pension services. 

This is how you calculate the pension in Malaysia:

For instance, if you work for the Government in 30 years and your latest salary is around RM5,000, your monthly pension will be:

You get RM3,000 every month for doing nothing! How best this is! And not to mention that this amount of pension is higher than most of the low tier monthly income!

EPF - Employees Provident Fund

According to EPF, they have declared a dividend rate of 6.15% for Conventional Savings 2018, which in my opinion, the interest rate is quite good. However, the amount of contribution each month into EPF is not as much as I would want it to be.

I have no confidence that EPF (Employees Provident Fund) can give me a good amount of retirement fund, though the compound interest of EPF is considered very good compared to Fixed Deposit. This leads me to keep searching for a way to build my passive income for my retirement.

Dividend Investing as Passive Income

One day, I am searching for info about a passive income on the Internet, then I found a blog called Dividend Magic. His idea of using Dividend from Stock Investment as a passive income blows my mind. This is the method with the least efforts to earn a passive income for oneself! In fact, this is not just merely a tool for financial freedom, but I see this as my plan for a retirement fund as well. Maybe I will not plan to retire at an early age, but it is good to have a portfolio that gives me continuous passive income.

As I love to manage my own finance, I am also very interested to explore in dividend investing. As I am working in Singapore now, it is quite inconvenient for me to go to the bank and open a brokerage account. Hence Rakuten Trade is my best option to open my first brokerage account. Other than the ability to open an account online, Rakuten also has very competitive pricing on their brokerage fee.

I will write a review of Rakuten Trade when I free. Will share it here soon.

Why I Start This Blog

I found that there is only one blogger who shares his dividend investing portfolio in public, which is Dividend Magic. Personally, I think dividend investing is very underrated in Malaysia now. This is a great idea of building up a retirement fund for yourself, especially those who do not work in the government sector.  I really hope more Malaysians could expose to this investing road and don't depend on the EPF fund only.