2008: The Year Where Change Is The Only Constant In Life

It has been quite a hectic year. I had been relatively quite busy with work and part-time Masters Course that I enrolled in, and having a pregnant wife and a 2-year old that clamors for attention all the time just adds up to the ‘fun’. So, when I finished my last paper last week (for the semester, not the course, unfortunately :( ), it was quite a load off my back! Well, it will be a few more weeks before the new semester kicks in and I will have to start on my thesis then; and I imagine my life would be more miserable because of it but as of now, I am ‘relatively’ a free man.

2008 has been a very interesting and eventful year for me. It is the year where ‘change’ is the one single word that describes my life perfectly. It feels just like yesterday that my son was born, and I would spend whole day Saturday nursing him alone while my wife had to work. Now my wife no longer works Saturdays; she found a job at the same company I’m working at where we don’t work on weekends, and we have an Indon maid at home. However it is now my turn to not be available on weekends to attend classes.

Our home also used to be a mighty boring place, where my wife would always complaint my lack of effort to at least install railings for her to put on curtains on our windows. We put up with a pareo on the window of our bedroom, with a darned large lizard painting on it; that used to be our only curtain in the whole apartment. Right in the middle of the year before Aidilfitri, I must have hit my head on something, or my wife must have put me on some crazy voodoo spell; I suddenly decided that my old humble home needed new windows! So now, instead of having the old “lever and stained glass” type windows from the 80’s, my humble apartment now have modern aluminium casement-type windows, complete with double railings, heavy curtains and on top of that we now have a small dining area renovated from where the old clogged washing machine area used to be.

Sometime towards the end of the year, my retired dad mentioned about changing his car. HIS car, not mine; and he was interested in Nissan X-Trail. So, being the curious son that I am, I began scourging the net for info on the car. I thought X-Trail was too big for him, so instead of looking at just X-Trail, I widen up my scope to other cars in the SUV/MPV category, which brought me and my wife to have a huge crush on Toyota Rush, which is in the sub-RM100k category. Suddenly the search for dad’s car became the search for my own car, and after doing more and more research, I decided that I can only afford a new car within an RM50k budget. Voila, there goes my wife’s old humble Inokom Atos 1.0, and here comes my new Chevrolet Nabira 2.2. Well, the car is not exactly new; it is used, and from year 2003 but it is very well-maintained. Nevertheless, I still call her ‘janda’. The original owner according to the grant was Dato’ Shahriman Shamsuddin of Sapura fame and by some twist-of-fate the car now falls to the hands of this miserably poor electronics Engineer… how ironic! Well, the car is at least twice more comfortable than our old Atos, it is also twice as hungry in terms of petrol consumption and I have to pay twice as much for the installment, road tax, insurance etc.

And my dad is still looking for his dream car.

This year also marks my success in transitioning to almost 100% Islamic banking and financing. I ditched my old housing loan with BLR+0.25% interest rate to Islamic BFR-1.5%, capped at about 10%; can’t remember the exact figure. I was still in lock-in period with my old bank, but the saving from interest rate will be way more than the penalty that I needed to pay. I also shorten my loan period from 30 to 10 years, which means I’ll have to fork out more cash each month but again, I will be saving a lot in the long run. My janda’s 5-year loan also is Islamic financed, my salary account is Islamic, my investments are with Islamic trust funds and I plan to enroll in takaful whenever I can afford to later. I only have one conventional bank account which I hardly use, and an investment account that my mom is using to park some excess cash. Everything else is Islamic and Syariah-compliant, and I am very proud of this. Insya-Allah, God-willing, I hope for barakah.

Hey, but not everything is rosy for 2008. I also now owe a SIGNIFICANT amount of money to my mom, thanks to my relentless pursuit of crazy house renovation and new janda (I intend to pay every cent Ma!!! XD ). I also have less cash to spend every month due to the new housing loan, car loan and maintenance, and I have had to tighten my belt just a little more. We’ll have a baby coming in about 2 month’s time, and the janda is a darned hungry beast. Global economic downturn and high price of food do make things worse. We dine at home as much as we can now, minimizes eating out, and I regularly eat heavy breakfast and skip lunch. Even then it’s pretty hard to make ends meet each month, and I seriously considered switching company for a higher pay. Unfortunately that particular rival company is only willing to give me about 10% raise from what I’m making now, so it doesn’t make sense for me to make the jump. Else, that would be another remarkable change for me! I am also fatter than last year, and a lot more stressful.

Some things never change though. I still fail to get my wife to cover up; though I remember she promised to do so after our second baby this coming January (I do suspect she’ll conveniently forget though :p ). Anwar Ibrahim is still not Prime Minister yet, Mahathir is still around poking sticks at everything, and Malaysian Parliamentarians are still a bunch of monkeys that care more about bananas than the looming Global Economic Crisis. Well perhaps that would add to the challenge of 2009, where I will be busier than ever with a new baby at home, new projects coming in at work, a thesis that I have yet to start on, a wife that will argue with me at every silly thing and a growing son that can’t stop climbing on anything that is vertical.

Let’s see if I can still write like this next year.