Archive for August, 2007

First of all, this is kinda bit lame, but I am extending my deepest condolences to the families of the 20 people who lost their family or friend in the Bukit Gantang Super Coach accident a few days ago. It’s really a sad day for the bus companies , especially with the Merdeka Celebrations just round the corner, and that the bus went off the ravine at the most ’safe’ areas on the North South Expressway, and that they were just less than an hour away from their destination.

Which comes to reiterate my point during my last scooter ride down to Singapore, which I was riding quite fast (90 to 100km/h) the whole way, and that ALL THE EXPRESS BUSES OVERTOOK ME like a real ghost rider. Even the worst offenders were like the ever so fast Durian Tunggal , “Must Be early” Konsortium Bus Express (KBES) red devil, and even the local Kulim First Travel was going super fast, approximating to be 140km/h onwards. Which is why I WOULD RATHER RIDE MY BIKE AND RISK IT THAN TO TAKE A BUS!!

Coming from the Prime Minister, Dato Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi talking about bus drivers being as fit as a pilot, I must say, this is really a piss. He knows it all. Bus drivers are known to consume DRUGS. Without them, they cannot stay awake. 90KM/h is too slow, yes, but no one enforce the law. There was a hype many years ago about GPS Tachograph, and people fiddle with it. Even the Goods Vehicle Inspection is tainted with corruption at Puspakom, with the help of supporting documents of Borang Biru 4 keping (4pcs of the blue form aka 4 x $50) or at the least purple forms ($100). Even JPJ knows about it, but don’t bat an eyelid. And worst still, enforcement are mainly during office hours.

So, come to my point of issue: Let’s follow the EU or at least UK system. Which is fair and square. I know it cuz I was a Goods Driver too. Worst off stricter rules for Bus and Coaches.

1) No fiddle GPS Tachograph.A tachograph records the speed,time,distance.Just like a black box.
2) A separate agency to enforce this ruling , like VOSA in the UK, which is both a cop and the vehicle inspectorate.
3) Automatic speed control device with link up to the Tacho, and when they refuel, it’s been uploaded to the central agency.

So, in other words, if at any moment, the vehicle is caught with something dodgy, the inspection center will get it too. And that the system allows only to the dot ruling for driving hours, which is 4.5 hours of drive time, and then a 45mins break,with the engine off, and another 4.5 hours, and extendable to another hour twice a week after another 45mins break, in which, the vehicle must rest for at least 8 hours. Even with TWO DRIVERS, we can only extend for another 4. hours, totalling to 13 drive hours, in which both drivers and vehicle is blacked out from operation for 11hours!

Look,even at 90km/h, it’s enough to drive 400km at a stretch. With breaks, it’s even enough to drive from Singapore to Hadyai, Thailand. I rode my bike at 90km/h…and I know. Lorries with trailers and over-sized loads must be capped to 70km/h instead as they cannot brake in time as efficient as the bus. If the bus accident is bad, what of the lorries who crashed into the cars and exterminate the entire clan?? Happened a few weeks back too in Alor Star, Kedah. WHOLE FAMILY DEAD!!!

Enforcement must be made without borders or jurisdictions or even time. The new VOSA must be a roaming team, arresting drivers at any point, day , night or early morning. Especially the Early Morning or Graveyard hours.

They must really enforce these strict laws for ALL BUS, be it BUS EXPRESS, BUS KILANG , BUS SEKOLAH and Scheduled Buses, as they too drive like crazy. Make all bus be no older than 3 years old for the express due to their long trips, 5 for Bus Kilang (worker bus) and 7 for Bus Sekolah as the chassis or coachwork will be so deteriorated after then. They must destroy these buses after that.

Looking at which, a bus express can clock 800km a day,7days a week, which is like 292,000km a year at legal speed limits, but are known to clock over 350,000 to 400,000km even for bus companies like Transnational or Konsortium. Only the government owned MARA Liner is at least following the law a bit. And, if they want to say their bus is EXPRESS HANTU, then their company must also have the same name, not under alot of aliases.

So, to enforce this situation, I am suggesting MONTHLY CHECKS. FULL COMPANY REPAIR LOGS and use of GPS tagged Tachograph. So there is no more fiddles. How many lives must be lost before they take more action. And stop the finger pointing. Any death means, the JPJ, the Police, the Puspakom, the company and the DRIVING SCHOOL which issues the licensing are all responsible!!

I dread the trend after the Merdeka Celebrations. The Raya rush.Will more be sacrificed?
One suggestion is to have a PASSENGER MANIFEST, like a plane, passenger name and ID No will just be fine, so should like this happen, they know who are on the bus, not to have to figure out so and so are unidentified bodies. Sad huh??

What about the families back home etc???

Help me help you too…..Demand more. Demand your MP!

Me..I’m prepping for my trip to Europe, and yeah, it’s costing me already $21,000!

“In Time, Man is always in a loss…” is so much true when Allah SWT said that in the Quran that time must always be on our side, not against it.

I was reading thru my DailyWealth newsletter when the writer really makes me look a few steps back at the current economic times, that losing some paper value is better than getting no money at all. Greed is a real problem here, and likewise, lose a bit but gain a lot more is a real aspect, and true to their words, never advise anything to Family.

Here is the full quote:
Real Estate in the Spotlight:
Waiting, Hoping, and Dreaming
By Chris Weber
August 04, 2007

It seems as if the whole planet is holding its breath while waiting to see what will happen to housing prices in the United States. Will they fall enough to cause a crisis in confidence that will turn the globe’s biggest spenders into scared savers?

So far anyway, the markets are saying that this fall will only affect those directly involved in homebuilding and the lending industry. And although the world’s stock markets have declined in the past two weeks, many are very close to all-time highs.

I’ve been warning that U.S. home prices peaked in the summer of 2005. And the difficulties in the subprime market and the homebuilders since then have not surprised me.

In times like these I try to put myself in the market’s shoes. This means that I try to objectively look for evidence that maybe the real estate situation will not spill over into the general economy in either the U.S. or – by extension – the rest of the world.

I got a sort of direct education from “ground zero” recently. I grew up in Phoenix, which was one of the areas where house prices soared the most, and where people benefited the most. This has had an affect on the psychology of the average person there.

I recently spent time with one of these average persons. Until I was about 13, we lived close to a family. The parents at times were almost like second parents to me, the son a kind of brother.

We kept in touch over the years. The mother especially has some regard for my financial advice. I last gave it back in 2001 when I found that this 73-year-old widow’s money was almost entirely in “aggressive growth” stock funds. Coming off of a high-tech bust that I thought was going to get worse, this was the worst place for a person like that to be. I put her money into a simple combination of Treasury notes and gold stocks.

Needless to say, she was very appreciative of how things worked out. She asked me to come out several months ago to help her with a new problem: her house. She’d owned it for 30 years. She’s now 79. It is a two-story house, though, and she was worried that if her health deteriorated, it was smarter to move to a single-story house without stairs.

To keep a long story short, I convinced her she should sell her house and rent a nice one-story house in her same neighborhood. For her to buy another house now doesn’t make much sense to me. We saw some houses for rent: The rents are so low that they’d take just a fraction of the monthly pension money she gets. In other words, she could sell her house, put the proceeds with all her other invested money, and not have to touch those assets at all.

Just with the money she’d save in property taxes and general homeowners costs, she’d be able to pay for several months a year of rent. And with her other regular pension payments, she’d have much more than enough money to meet her expenses: Indeed, she’d have a lot left over.

It all sounds simple. But I hadn’t reckoned with one thing. For this to work in the least amount of time, she’d have to price her house to sell. As in many parts of the U.S. where house prices rose the fastest, houses for sale have soared in number. Many of them have been sitting on the market for months. She said she was ready to sell and move into a nice one-story house before she’d need to for health reasons.

But when it came to pricing her house, trouble began. “I’m not going to give it away” was her refrain. My advice to price the house at whatever it took to sell it quickly met with opposition from her son and herself. At the end, I only managed to get them to offer it at about 2.5% below the price they had first wanted.

Well, they’ve not received one offer. Who knows if they ever will?

The potential tragedy here is one of – dare I say it? – greed. This woman bought the house at a time when no one could have foreseen values going up as much as they have. At the price they’re asking, with realtor fees taken out, they’d make nearly 450% on this home that has sheltered her for three decades. Moreover, as I explained, she really doesn’t need to hold out for the last dollar. If the object is to get into a one-story house, then that should be the priority. So what if she lowers the asking price to one where she’d “only” end up making 350%? It’s all gravy anyway. She wouldn’t need to touch this money or the money she already has to make her expenses. By holding out for a higher price, she is risking having to stay in a house no longer suited to her at a time when that can be much less comfortable for her.

Of course, looking at it, there is really no way I can win giving advice here. Let’s say I’d managed to talk them into lowering the asking price for it to sell fast at only a 350% profit. Let’s say it sold fast. Then both mother and son would easily be angry with me for talking them into pricing it too low and “losing” all that extra money.

That’s one reason why I don’t like to give financial advice to family – or even “semi-family.” Too many emotions are involved. The emotion of greed is the worst that an investor can have, except for panic.

The day I left the U.S. to fly back home, a friend told me another story. In the Washington DC area, he’d been house hunting. One house he was interested in was priced at $300,000. He offered $285,000. It was rejected. He got the “back-story”: The owner, a Christian pastor, was ready to retire. They’d already bought a house in Nebraska, closer to their family. He’d wanted to sell the house originally for $325,000, but was talked into offering it for $300,000.

So in his mind he’d already taken a loss of $25,000 on his house. He didn’t want to “lose” any more.

The money in the house was their retirement. He didn’t want to jeopardize that. But that is exactly what he is doing, though getting him to see it that way would be impossible. By not accepting a very acceptable offer just 5% below their asking price, he is risking not ever being able to sell the house for anything close to what he otherwise could have gotten. And all the time, he’s squeezed, having already bought his next house.

At this point in America’s history, it is hard to escape the fact that too many people are being too greedy in what they want for their homes. As a result, more homes are sitting on the market unsold. Some are occupied, and some are not. Like that newly bought home in Nebraska that is not yet occupied, there are over 2 million homes in the U.S. now empty.

So far, the owners are able to carry them. They are waiting, hoping for things to turn around and for them to get the prices they want for their homes. All the while, more homes are being added to the market each month. Some are foreclosures. Some are people or estates that have to sell in the normal course of human events like death or divorce.

Some are new homes that were planned or built during the boom times only to be ready when the market has drastically changed.

Who do these sellers think the buyers will be for their homes that they want top dollar for? There is no rush to buy anymore. The house-hunter I talked to whose good offer was rejected is happy staying in his rented house. This house would sell for $200,000. He pays $850 a month in rent for it. That means that whoever owns the house is only getting a gross return of 5% a year on this house they rent out. After taxes, insurance, and upkeep expenses, they may not be making anything at all. They’d certainly be making more just sitting in T-bills.

But while it is not a great deal for the owner, it is certainly one for the renter. Why should he rush to better his offer to the pastor of $285,000? He instinctively knows that time is on his side.

And time is not on the side of those people trying to sell their homes in America today. Time is a powerful ally to have on your side. But you don’t want it on the other side.

To my mind, most of the sellers today in the U.S. are living in a dream world. They are dreaming of prices that were seen at the peak. For the moment, they are ready to wait and keep dreaming. But people cannot do this forever. At some point, reality will hit home. Time catches up with us all: People age; they have to sell. Or they can no longer pay the price of having two homes. Or they watch their retirement money melting away each month and finally they panic.

I think that millions of people are going to realize that they simply don’t have as much money as they thought they did. When this happens, they are going to cut back spending on all sorts of things. This will have global repercussions.

So I think the general markets are being too optimistic about the future. For me, this is an argument for being “underweight” in stocks and real estate and “overweight” in cash. Those sitting fat and happy in cash are going to have some great opportunities to buy homes in the next few years. But those too greedy will be sorry, as they nearly always have in the past.

Good investing,

Chris Weber

Editor’s note: Chris Weber is hands down one of the best investors we know. In over 35 years of investing, he has never had a losing year. Right now, Chris is recommending three ways to play the bull market in precious metals – as well as a savings account that yields double-digit returns annually. If you’re interested, click here to get the details.

Yes. I am going thru the system logs to rectify the System Crash to the network last week.

So……