When you are tired and stress, it is good to take a deep breathe, clear your mind and relax. Take yourself out of this world into a fairy tale world. Learn from the children. How often do you see a child with stress? But they can give you some, if you want. Jokes aside, they are simple and all they want is fun.

Some fairy tales to recommend is Mulan, Aladdin, Peter Pan, Nemo and Cinderella. Of cause, there are many others. Watch one of this and you find yourself in a magical world. A great way to relieve stress, try it.

I just finished watching Lizzie McGuire Movie – This Is What Dreams Are Made Off. It feels good.

I sold some shares a month ago and the broker sent me a US cheque. As you know there are bank fees involved in cashing US cheque. The cheque needs to send back to the US bank for verification. The bank told me that they charged 0.1% of the amount on the cheque, minimum RM10. Stamp duty is RM0.15. I went to CIMB to cash out my cheque. It took around 4 weeks to cash out. I heard Citibank giving a lower rate if you have an account with them. Not sure how true.

If you are selling shares amounting to greater than US10K, it is better to use wire transfer as the cost of that is US25. Save the hassle and faster turn around time to get your money.

How many of you have invested in Unit Trust? How many of you know how? I am not a pro as well in Unit Trust investment so I chose to take a lower risk Unit Trust investment. Malaysia still got a lot of work to do in making Unit Trust work for us. Before investing, I did some research and reading on the good funds out there. Public Mutual has won a couple of awards and some of the funds have good track record of their yearly earnings.

Do you know you can use your EPF funds to invest? You are eligible if

1) Your balance greater than RM55K in Account 1
2) Below 55 years old
3) Must not have any withdrawal from Account 1 in last 3 months.

The minimum amount you can invest is RM1K and maximum is 20% of your balance in Account 1 minus 50K.

Withdrawal Documents required are 2 copies of your NRIC with clear thumb prints and completed the application forms. It will take 1-2 weeks for it to process if your agent is efficient.

I have invest in Public Mutual Savings Fund for 3 years now and the average return is 8%, not bad yeah as compare to the EPF 4-5%. For saving funds, if the company profits, dividends are given to boost up your investment. Lastly, to maximize the growth of your funds, you have to increase the fund yearly by doing a yearly withdrawal.

I am not an agent of any of the funds mentioned. In all investment there are risks. Do not simply blindly make an investment based on what agents tell you. Previously I have bought other trust funds that made loses, beware of those. Do the research and see the historical records. Most of it is published in TheEdge or other investment magazines.

Someone asked me to blog about stocks trading in US. It is really simple to trade shares in US. All you need is to open an online trading account. There are couples of US online trading available like Ameritrade, eTrade, Scottrade and others. Each has its own pricing, benefit and T&C. You have to pay attention to Service Fee, Trading Fee and other administration fees.

Here is a chart that I have put up, note there may be changes to the fees:

My advice to you before selecting a trading account, do read their company portfolio and read customers’ review on their company.

After you have chosen an online trading account, you registered and open an account. You have to fill W8 BEN form. This form is to state that you are not an US Citizen, if you aren’t. You will be tax differently.

Do not play with Margin Options, switch it off. This option allows you to borrow money to invest in the shares. It can burn you deeply if your shares fall under its value. Interest is high.

With US shares, you can buy 1 unit. It is different from Malaysia where you need to buy minimum of a 1000. Of coz, it is a little crazy to buy 1 unit as you will be wasting transaction fees. Let say company XYZ share is US20. You can buy say 10 units and pay US200 + transaction fees.

Selling and buying is just a click of a button. The trading acct will provide you with tools like streamer that allow you to view the shares price live and online. You can set it to your targeted shares. For me, I am long term investor, I do not do any short selling. I buy and keep. However if the shares go up to a certain threshold, I may sell. Some shares do give out dividends when the company profits.

You can also set your target price on the trading tool. When it hits the target price, your shares will be automatically sold off. This is very useful especially when you cannot monitor US shares during the night time. Sometimes shares can hit the peak for short period of time and dropped quickly.

Lastly when you have profited and want to transfer money back, you can use wire transfer to bring money home to any local banks. You need to request your local bank swift code or ABA routing number. All local banks have it. In your trading account, you need to fill up your wire transfer information with ABA routing code, your local account number and other required information. Happy Investing.

Take note any investments, there are risks. Before diving into an investment, do your research. There are message boards (aka forum) from Yahoo or any other where a lot of people talk about the individual company. You can gain some information from it. There are also analyst reports to help you with. However it has a lot of financial terms which is difficult to digest.

How many of you backup your own blog? Do you trust your server hosting company to do a good job? As I do not pay a significant amount of money for my host server, some of the things I have to do on my own. My host server management is actually doing a great job, they have proper backup process in place.

A word of warning to you, especially for those who are earning from PPP or whatever advertising program, backup your blog. You may not know when a hacker will strike or a server crash. It happens as hardware is not 100% reliable. If all your postings are gone, those unpaid sponsored post will be gone.

I am running my blog on a very old version. I kind of like the old version interface and got used to it for so many years. The new version sometimes gives me a headache. With this old version, there isn’t any export function. On top of that, it is an old version, so installation of the old version may not be available in the even I need a recovery.

Anyway, I found an excellent plugin (wp-xmlmigrate plugin) to export it to XML file from http://technosailor.com/wordpress-to-wordpress-import/ . For those running on WP 2.x and above, there should be an export function. You can export your entire blog to XML file and store it in your PC periodically. On top of that, I also backup my blog database. I believed the XML restoration will be faster than restoring the database.

I did a lot of searching before I found this plugin, there were many other plugins that I installed which didn’t work. One that I downloaded, mess up my entire blog. Imagine, my entire blog gone, yes a total blank page. If you were me, you will freak out. Fortunately I had backup and restore it. It works, phew. Backup is very important, so put some thoughts into it.

Oh, for those who do not know what I am saying because it is too technical, check with your hosting server company and ask them about their backup process. I think they can help you.

I have this glass door, a separation between the dinning/living hall with the kitchen. However it was bear for quite a while. I wanted to put some deco but I didn’t find the right one. While I was in Scotland I saw this jello type of deco. It is easy to stick on and remove. No stain will be left on the glass. I did the fish and my children help me with the flower. Now my glass door looks beautiful.

Update: The product is called Gel Gem. Info here: http://www.gelgems.com/GelGems/default.asp

I must applaud Singapore Airlines for their first class service. Every time I travel with them, it has always been pleasant. This is not a sponsored post. Why am I impressed? For one, I always get good seating for long distance flights. When I went to US, I have no one sitting beside me, giving me ample space to sleep. When I went to UK, the same thing happened. It is not just going flight but the return flight too. By the way, you can pick your seat on the Internet and check in electronically. I was too lazy to do that.

However there was an old guy sitting near the aisle and I was at the window seat. This old guy drinks a lot of water and he never move to go to the gents. He never sleeps too. The only time I took opportunity to go to the toilet was when after meal.

The most impressive about SIA was, my London flight that came in late. I had only 30 minutes to rush to the gate of my connecting flight from Singapore back to Penang. The steward allowed me to leave the aircraft ahead of the first class and business class passengers. Ha! I ran and barely made it. All the passengers had board the plane. Phew. Imagine when I board the plane, 10 minutes to takeoff.

Next worry was “Did my check in luggage make it?” If not, the luggage will come in on the next available flight into Penang. It will really spoil the happiness when I cannot show the gift I got for my children, when they come and pick me up. 30 minutes for them to unload and load. I don’t know how they do it, but they did it. I was also the first one who got my check in luggage and I am not even on business class.

Bravo SIA!

After my thyroid case, I try to improve my health, not that I am unhealthy but I am not getting any younger. Recently I heard 5 cancer cases among my dear friends. It is sort of an alert for me to take good care of my health.

Few months ago as I was browsing around MPH book shop, I picked up this book called “What your doctor doesn’t know about nutritional medicine may be killing you.” It was a good read and opens my eyes a little on supplements. I have always been told if I eat nutritiously, my body is able to capture all the nutrition and vitamins I need. However, as my little body grows old and due to work stress, sometimes it doesn’t function a 100% in absorbing the nutrients I need. Therefore, I need to take supplements. I don’t take it all the time, I only take it when I need it, usually when I have lack of sleep, menstrual cycle day and when I am faced with lots of stress.

Back to the book, the book talks about people with serious disease such as cancer, stroke, diabetes, heart disease and many more. It teaches me what supplements are good for what? The writer who is a doctor himself mentioned lots of unhealthy medication for serious disease that can kill you. It may work to cure your disease but the side effects will kill you. Taking the optimal amount of certain supplements can help fight disease if you have to take nasty medication such as chemotherapy. You need to consult a doctor for the right prescription but often doctor who is not into nutritional medication will oppose to it.

Do you know that you need 7 daily servings of vegetables and fruits? I love eating vegetables especially salad. Funny, I do crave for it every now and then. I love to cut celery and carrots into sticks, keep it in my fridge. Whenever my teeth wanna chew something, I will chew that. I love every kind of vegetables and fruits. I was thinking of investing on a good juicer (Jack Lalanne Power Juicer) but my hubby will say “You probably use it once and then will leave it there collecting dust”. Yeap he knows me so well.

Above all, I need to thank God for taking care of me and my family. I once asked my hubby, if he knew he has terminal illness and only a few months of life what will he do. He told me that he will spend time with the family and he will meditate on God’s word. He said he will be thrill to be call home to meet God. How true. Life does not end in death.

I must apologize to you because lately my host server has been cranky due to spam I guess. Many of you had left me comment and the “error” page appear. Some of you may have left duplicate comments due to this. Yeah I notice. It is okay because I will clean up those duplicated comments.

The host server used to be 95% reliable when I started. It is among the cheapest server anyone can get. Customer Service was also superb, not that I hassle them always. :giggles: Anyway these few years, the reliability has drop tremendously. The server management is not able to filter spams that hit them.

I will give them one more year before I change. Hehehe…giving myself excuse. Moving to another server take some effort and I am either too busy or lazy to do. Any good and cheap server hosting out there? Opps, please don’t spam me yeah.

Ribena is giving free berry soft toys. I got 2 big bottles just to get Mr.Chef and Mr.Policeman for my children. I think they are cuties. When it comes to cute freebies, I cannot resist. Sometimes I rather buy things that come with freebies than without. Mummies out there who did buy Ribena for the soft toy, raise your hands. :shoot: I am sure those haven’t and read my blog will do so. 😆

Look another 2 cute Japanese dolls soap liquid pump from Shokubutsu range. It has been sitting my shelf, collecting dust. It sure looks cute. Anyway I quite like the body soap. After using, I find my skin feels softer. My back of my arm used to be dry and rough. Now it feels different.

Keep me update if you hear of any freebies.