Financial Habits in Malaysia and Around the World

FINANCIAL PLANNING SERIES – Part 1

• 3-minute read

In 2020, a survey launched by the financial literacy platform Multiply showed that 70% of Malaysians require financial literacy support[1]. Of the areas where Malaysians need help the most, budgeting and savings were noted as the most common issues.

Another survey conducted by Ringgit Plus in 2021 shows that 50% of Malaysians cannot survive for more than 3 months on their savings alone. The same survey, also, shows that only 15% of the Malaysians believe that their Employees’ Provident Fund (EPF) is sufficient for the rest of their retirement years.  Of those who believe their EPF won’t be enough, 45% of them have not even started planning for their retirement[2].

Around the world, financial literacy seems to be a major issue, too.  Based on a survey conducted by OECD in 2020 across 26 countries from Asia, Europe, and Latin America, only 26% of the adults surveyed were able to answer questions on simple and compound interest correctly[3].

As the Covid-19 pandemic continues more people are losing jobs or getting pay cuts; as such financial literacy has been put at the forefront and the need to learn financial planning has been underscored.

The low financial literacy rate globally is such an irony given the efforts by international private organizations and charities to improve the global financial literacy rate[4]. Some countries such as the United Kingdom integrate financial literacy into their early education programmes. There are efforts in the United States, as well, to make personal finances a part of the early education curriculum, improve mitigation and retirement planning. Some financial institutions, fintech or software firms, financial advisors, and even some private individuals are developing platforms, apps, and/or online sources that aim at educating people about financial planning. In the video-sharing and social media platform, YouTube, alone, one can find about 388 million videos that talk about financial planning and how to do it.

If you are a part of the statistics that haven’t started thinking about your future and finances yet, the current global outlook should be motivation enough for you to consider financial planning. While we’re all starting to live our lives amidst the Covid pandemic, we never know when this will end or if we will need to brave another storm in the near future.

As a gold investment company, EION Management is joining the efforts in upskilling people’s financial knowledge and skills. In the next parts of this series, we will walk you through the steps in financial planning and we’ll be giving you tips and available tools online to make this process easy for you.

You can check the second part of our Financial Planning Series, “Importance of Planning” here.

You can also watch the first video of our Financial Planning Series here.