Winner of the Carrot Principle

Early this month, I wrote a post about the recent fuel hike that caused a series of inflated prices on many daily expenses including food, transportation and other services.  I would like to thank those who had spent time and effort to give your opinion and participate in the comment. They will also stand a chance to get a free book – The Carrot Principle. As promised, the winner of the book will be announced today.

Before that, I had picked some interesting comments that are worth to be shared with you here. If you want to read the full comments, go to the inflation post and scroll down to the comment section.

Kenny Lau from Sungai Petani

We are taking dinner at home… my mom is cooking for us… Thus, I felt I am a lucky guy actually at this moment… This has proven a chinese phrase “An old folk is equal to treasure”.

Change your vehicle spark plug to a better one like platinum and use a good grade engine oil.. Crude oil price shooted sky high is a fact now… My friend is asking me to change of my spectra, cuz they said this car is a oil sucker. But, when I am calculated my monthly usage and told them ” I could not save 50k ringgit in ten years if I trade in my car and get a CVVT or VVTI vehicle like Vios and Civic.

I grew up in Sungai Petani too. The food there is in fact very cheap compared to Penang and K.L. My parents still live there and they still cook every single meal at home. You are a lucky guy, Kenny!

The next interesting comment is from Angeline:

I think the best thing i have done so far is changing my job to a higher paying one, and where the employer pays for my petrol (as it is quite a distance). The boss must have regretted it now as the fuel hike announcement was made after that LOL

I have heard some companies giving petrol allowance as high as RM0.70/km. Angeline has made a good move.

Lousai shares his view about managing cash flow:

First of all even before Fuel hike etc, as an ordinary person depending on single source of wage, i ‘ve started with expenses/income sheet tracking since year 2005. I found it not only tell how much your earn( most ppl do) and how much you spend your hard earn $$ to.

As a result, i can do projection on how much i need to save p.m for a particular event like holiday, getting a new gadget etc.

Vincent Lee from Sabah had written a great comment sharing tips to practically cut down fuel expenses and electricity bill. Read his tips:

• 18 Tips on Saving your Petrol
• How to Cut your Electricity Bill?
• What Bill to Pay First and Way to Save

Also from Sungai Petani, Muhammad Ooi who is a Prudential agent gives us some practical tips too:

What you have done to minimize the fuel hike impact?

– for me, just do more sales. eat healthy, replace our daily teh tarik, milo ais with air kosong sendiri..

– plan my journey properly, plan to combine several appointment in same day.

– i produce my own product, sell it for RM 10 each. Just use the profits to cover my fuel and working hours meals cost. No need deduct the travel cost from my main income.

Next is an insightful comment from SG. I guess he is from Penang who lend me the book Cash Proof. I almost finish reading it. It is a great book indeed. This is what SG said:

Contrary to what people tend believe, only central banks create inflation.

The classical economics definition of inflation is ‘ increase in the total stock of money’. Since we’re using paper money and not gold and silver (like a century ago), there will always be inflation if there is more paper money being created. Actually, economic growth causes prices to FALL.

JC is concerned about the rising crime rate caused by bad economy:

All the inflation and price hike is causing crime rates to increase too. Two weeks back a Honda CRV (less than a year old) was stolen from my house. The car was parked inside a locked gate. I hope to highlight this to other owners of such car to be careful.

NK thinks that increasing knowledge is a better solution:

Instead of focus on the cost cutting, I am looking at other other area like improve my productivy, increase personal market value and knowledge. I believe all this self upgrade will become very useful when opportunities arrived.

How to achieve that?
Well.. The simple way is reading more books, documents.. NO neccessary you have to buy the book, you can borrow from friends or library. How about the Internet? full of resources. The beauty is it is FOC. 🙂

Last but not least, blogger Voyager8 shares some tricks to cut cost without sacrifice. Visit his blog for more information.

Sometimes, you can save cost without scarifying anything. Here is now I did it.

I applied to a petrol rebate credit card, to get the 2% rebate for petrol consumption, and 0.5% rebate on other consumptions with the card. The platinum credit card is free for life, so I don’t need to pay anything for annual fee too.

I really appreciate all your participation. I do hope that I have something for each one of you, but I only have one book to give away. For those who has a blog, I hope the links here will give you some valuable traffic.

The winner is Kenny Lau. I wish this book will get you to the higher management position in your career soon. Please contact me with your mailing address.

I hope to make this free book giveaway a monthly event. Keep in touch!