Rising Health Costs

Sometimes I wonder if there’s ever such a thing as affordable health insurance. Insurance companies keep pushing medical cards at us on the premise that the premiums will increase if we don’t sign up with them. However, this insurance is renewable on an annual basis so wouldn’t the premium increase anyway, irregardless of your age when you sign up? Whatever it is, it seems like we can no longer do without health care considering how the prices of healthcare are uber expensive and are only set to rise in the near future.

Pressing The Emergency Button

One thing good about my parents condo is how each unit comes equipped with a red button which acts as an emergency alert system. It is supposed to summon the guards whenever it is pressed in the event of any emergency. However, I do wonder what the guards can do if someone in the house is ill or there’s an emergency as they can’t open you front door to check if everthing is alright. So while the concept seems good, there might be some tweaking to the process required to ensure it works the way its meant to.

Dirty Water

Our condo water quality seems to be quite bad at times. Recently I filled up the kettle with some water to boil and was shocked to see how brown the water was! All this despite the condo having huge water filters in the basement where the car parks are.

DH was suggesting that we consider investing in a good internal water filter to ensure that the water we use to cook and drink is at least double-filtered. However, with the current plans we have, I’m not planning to spend additional money on household things for now.

Living Life To The Fullest

It isn’t often when a cartoon has a huge impact on me but when I recently caught Up! with DH, we both came away from the cartoon feeling like we had to live our lives to the fullest and enjoy every adventure there is out there.

I particularly like the way they started a Paradise Falls fund and was just suggesting that we should start the same too for exotic places that are on our bucket lists, be it Peru or acapulco! They say half the journey is won when you actually start it so I’m committing myself to starting a scrapbook of where I would like to go and our holiday travel fund. With the right mindset, I’m sure we can live our lives to the fullest and achieve our dreams!

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Exorbitant Rentals

DH has been doing a bit of house-hunting Down South. I knew that rental there was expensive but I never knew how terribly expensive it was. One of the places he looked at was a tiny little space of less than 600 sq ft and was totally bare except for some lighting fixtures hanging from the ceiling. That place was going at a whopping few thousand which was absolutely crazy! I can’t imagine people will pay so much for a place like that but evidently there are interested parties otherwise the prices wouldn’t be pushed up so high.

Hopefully we find an affordable place otherwise whatever potential savings we had would be just going into rent.

Cutting Up My Cards

The recent Budget didn’t go down very well with average Malaysians, especially in the area of the RM50 credit card tax. I’ve already started to cancel some of my cards where I can. I’ll still consider keeping one for the time being, just to take advantage of some of the great merchant services linked with that card such as free access to the airline lounges which helps a lot when I travel.

However I’ll be cutting up all those that don’t offer much. How about you? Are you cancelling your cards too?

Chatting Online

I’m so glad for Skype at home. It allows me to chat to DH at night after work. My old office used to allow all kinds of chat software such as MSN Messenger and Skype which helped me keep in touch with many of my friends. However, this new office is so strict that all kinds of chat have been banned except for the internal chat system. Even that is being kept a close watch on by my boss!

What a pity otherwise I can chat to DH every now and then too from work when I need to urgently tell him something. Thank goodness they have not banned internet emails such as Gmail or Yahoo!

IT Help

I used to tell myself I would never work weekends when I first started work but recently I’ve been logging in from home. I was just about to do that last night when my laptop corrupted! That required another trip back to the office this morning to log a help ticket with the global IT Helpdesk. Hopefully they can rectify it tomorrow. Otherwise I doubt there are any more spare laptops at work for me to work off.

I don’t like this global Helpdesk concept. It usually takes ages for our IT problems to be fixed and the local IT department no longer helps us on an as and when basis as we have to go through the Helpdesk and be put into a queue. It works for small issues but when someone urgently needs help, it does cause a lot of unnecessary delays.

Job Cuts

I was watching the news last night and was surprised to hear that unemployment was still at an all-time high in America. The news showed really long queues outside job centres and people trying to upgrade their skills in a local south jersey jobs skills centre. I thought the economy had shown signs of recovering but it appears that the man on the street still continues to be affected by the downturn and job cuts.

I should be thankful for my job then, as stressful as it is. At least it helps me pay the bills.