What Is Tax Rebate?

The example in the previous chapter shows a tax amount of more than RM4,000 – that’s quite a big sum. But this may not be your final tax yet. The last step you can make to reduce your tax is through tax rebate.

Most people confuse income tax rebate with income tax relief. The difference between the two is: a tax relief is deduction from the total income to derive your chargeable income, whereas tax rebate is deducted from the actual taxed amount.

Tax Rates For Year Of Assessment 2016 (Tax Filed In 2017)

Now that you understand how to derive your chargeable income to file for your 2016 income tax, we can calculate how much tax you will be paying for last year’s assessment.

What Is A Tax Exemption?

Fortunately, taxpayers in Malaysia are not taxed on our total income, as certain portions of our income are tax exempted. For income tax filed in Malaysia, we are entitled for certain tax exemptions that can reduce our overall chargeable income.

Tax exemptions either reduce or entirely eliminate your obligation to pay tax. Most taxpayers are entitled to an exemption on their tax return that reduces your tax bill in the same way a deduction does.

The following tax exemptions will not be included in the taxpayer’s EA Form:

The above tax exemptions are subject to approval, and conditions set by LHDN.

Read on to understand more about the above tax exemptions:

Tax Reliefs For Year Of Assessment 2016 (Tax Filed In 2017)

What is a income tax relief? Tax reliefs are set by LHDN, where a taxpayer is able to deduct a certain amount for money expended in that assessment year, from the total annual income. These are for certain activities or behaviours that the government encourages or even necessities or burdens to lighten our financial loads.

For income tax Malaysia, tax reliefs can help reduce your chargeable income, and thus your taxes. If planned properly, you can save a significant amount of taxes.

In our example, a taxpayer would have been taxed about 10% of his total chargeable income of RM84,300 if he had claimed no tax reliefs at all.

However, with the self & dependent tax relief of RM9,000, life insurance & EPF relief at RM6,000, his total chargeable income is now RM69,300, hence, he would only be taxed about 8% of his chargeable income.

What Is A Tax Deduction?

After deducting tax reliefs from your annual income, you can still reduce your chargeable income with tax deductions.

In Malaysia, a tax deduction is similar to a tax relief, where it reduces your chargeable income. Tax deductions are a result of Gifts and Donations.

Donations are only tax deductible if the donations are made to Government approved charitable organisation or directly to the Government, and you must keep the receipt of the donation.

For income tax 2017, if your chargeable income is RM55,000, and you’ve donated RM2,500 to an approved charitable organisation, you are allowed to deduct 7% of your aggregate income to reduce your chargeable income.

For income tax 2017, if your chargeable income is RM55,000, and you’ve donated RM2,500 to an approved charitable organisation, you are allowed to deduct 7% of your aggregate income to reduce your chargeable income.

Total chargeable income after tax deduction

= RM55,000 – (RM55,000 x 7%)

= RM55,000 – RM3,850

= RM51,150

What Is Chargeable Income?

First of all, you need to know what is considered income by Lembaga Hasil Dalam Negeri (LHDN). Is it just the monthly salary you get from your employer, or does it also include other types of income?

With effect from year 2016, an individual who earns an annual employment income of RM25,501 (after EPF deduction) has to register a tax file. These are the types of income that are taxable:

These are the types of income that are taxable:

• Business or profession
• Employment
• Dividends
• Interests (except bank deposit interests)
• Discounts
• Rent collected
• Royalties
• Premiums
• Pensions
• Annuities
• Perquisites, which includes bill claims, company credit cards, loans from company, sponsored club memberships, sponsored child tuition fee, personal driver and any benefits offered by your employer that could be converted into cash.

Here’s an example of how to derive your total income:

Malaysia Personal Income Tax Guide For 2017

Preparing and filing your income tax in Malaysia can be a challenging and anxiety-inducing experience every year for most people, but it doesn’t have to be if you understand how income tax works in this country.

Do you know how your tax is calculated? Are you aware that Malaysia adopts a progressive income tax rate system, which means that you only pay the higher rate on the amount above the rate? Do you know what the differences between tax exemptions, tax reliefs, tax rebates and tax deductibles are? How can you get higher income tax return?

If you have no clue what the answers for these questions are, plus many other income tax-related questions, you will have no idea how to plan your taxes well. Without planning, you won’t be able to maximise on the tax reliefs available, and get the tax savings you are eligible for.

Well, it is never too late to find out. With this simple and easy-to-understand Malaysia income tax guide 2017, you will be filing your tax like a whiz before April ends.

Now, let’s get started and find out what’s chargeable income!

How To Pay Income Tax In Malaysia

If you have paid your income tax payment in excess via the monthly tax deductions, the excess amount will be reimbursed to you via the bank account details that you had provided. For those who do not provide bank accounts, you will be reimbursed via cheques or the new tax refund voucher system (BBBC), which will be implemented in stages.

However, if you have taxes due, you can pay through various methods, such as e-banking, collection agents, and the ATMs to name a few. You can also pay your income tax via credit card. If you are looking for a card that will reward you for your tax payment, check out all the credit cards available in Malaysia.

Here are the many ways you can pay for your personal income tax in Malaysia:

1) Pay income tax via FPX Services

The FPX (Financial Process Exchange) gateway allows you to pay your income tax online in Malaysia. First of all you need an Internet banking account with the FPX participating bank.

The participating banks are as follows:

• Affin Bank & Affin Islamic Bank
• Alliance Bank & Alliance Islamic Bank
• AmBank & AmBank Islamic Bank
• Bank Islam
• Bank Rakyat
• CIMB Bank & CIMB Islamic Bank
• Hong Leong Bank & Hong Leong Islamic Bank
• HSBC & HSBC Amanah (Not available for Retail)
• Maybank & Maybank Islamic Bank
• Public Bank & Public Islamic Bank
• RHB Bank & RHB Islamic Bank
• UOB Bank

To make the payment, please go to ByrHASiL at https://byrhasil.hasil.gov.my/

Malaysia Income Tax e-Filing Guide

So, how to file income tax? Taxpayers can start submitting their income tax return forms through the e-Filing system starting from March 1 of every year, unless otherwise announced by LHDN. This method of e-filing is becoming popular among taxpayers for its simplicity and user-friendliness.

Unlike the traditional income tax filing, where you have to print out the income tax form and fill it in manually, the e-Filing income tax form calculates your income tax for you automatically. So, questions like “how to calculate my income tax” will not be stopping you from getting your income tax returns.

Filing your tax through e-Filing also gives you more time to file your taxes, as opposed to the traditional method of filing, where the deadline is usually on April 30.

If this is your first time filing your tax through e-Filing, don’t worry, we’ve got your back with this handy guide on e-Filing.

Here is how the short e-Filing process goes:

Cara semakan nama peminjam blacklist CTOS dan CCRIS

Individu yang gagal membuat pinjaman daripada perbankan dan institusi kewangan lain dengan alasan nama disenaraihitamkan (blacklist) CTOS dan CCRIS dinasihatkan menggunakan saluran yang betul untuk membuat semakan status bagi mengetahui sama ada benar-benar terlibat dengan masalah berkenaan. 

Apa yang kami lihat di internet ramai individu menggunakan ruangan komen di blog tertentu yang memberi info semakan CTOS dan CCRIS dengan mendedahkan maklumat peribadi mereka seperti no kad pengenalan. 

Sebagai peringatan, tindakan itu adalah kurang bijak kerana pihak atau admin blog itu tidak dapat membantu anda bagi membuat semakan laporan kredit sama ada nama anda sebagai peminjam atau penjamin di senaraihitamkan melainkan anda sendiri yang berusaha untuk berhubung dengan pihak atau agensi terlibat melalui saluran yang betul. 

Sekiranya anda memberikan butiran penting identiti, contohnya seperti nama penuh, alamat, no telefon, atau no kad pengenalan di ruang komen tersebut, secara tidak langsung ia terdedah kepada umum dan akan membuka peluang pihak yang tidak bertanggungjawab menyalahgunakan butiran peribadi dengan mengambil kesempatan terhadap masalah yang dihadapi oleh anda. 

Terdapat beberapa kes, dimana ada pihak atau individu yang tidak bertanggungjawab akan tampil mengambil kesempatan kononnya bagi menolong menyelesaikan masalah dengan mengenakan bayaran tertentu malah ada yang akan menghantar SMS bertujuan untuk menakut-nakutkan mereka yang menghadapi masalah ini. 

Dari mana mereka mendapat butiran maklumat untuk menghubungi anda?, salah satunya adalah daripada sikap ambil mudah anda dengan mendedahkan maklumat tersebut seperti yang kami nyatakan sebelum ini. 

Sehubungan dengan itu, anda dinasihatkan berhati-hati dan menggunakan saluran yang betul untuk tujuan tersebut.

10 Simple Steps to Make the Most of Every Day

“Success in life is founded upon attention to the small things rather than to the large things.” – Booker T. Washington

Our lives are a large collection of single days one right after the other. The sun rises, the sun sets, and it rises again. And in the end, the lives we chose to live will be determined by how we choose to spend each day.

Unfortunately, for most of my life, I embraced little intentionality in my days. I survived each new day, but made little effort to make the most of it. Instead, they simply just came and went… and many were wasted.

But over the past few years, my views have changed. I have begun to view each day as an important gift. I have sought to embrace each one individually and discover the potential that it holds. After all, some may get more days than others, but each of us have been given this one. And we ought to be making the most of it.

10 Little Stories About the True Power of Love

Sometimes, life produces the kinds of situations and events that no Hollywood scriptwriter could ever dream up. Comical, ambiguous, unpredictable, tragic — life is such a multifaceted thing. But whatever happens, there’s always space for love, kindness, happy occurrences, and simple wonder.

We at gathered together 10 powerful stories that will hit you right in the heart.

Review : Desolasi

Aiman is upset that the valet parking attendant stole his favourite 4U2C tape from the car. A scene from Desolasi.

Ironically, for a movie with a title that translates to “state of emptiness”, Desolasi is a full-on assault on the senses. It’s as if director Syafiq Yusof is afraid of desolation himself, to the point that his movie is filled with mind-boggling visual effects, neverending explosions and anguished cries.

The story revolves around Aiman (Syamsul Yusof), a visual artist with his own perception of reality. Growing up, he coloured his drawings differently from the other kids in school and that made his teacher upset. Aiman questioned why God allowed suffering in the world. He said God could make everyone happy by just giving them what they want.

Of course, this doesn’t sit well with his religious father (played by Datuk Jalaluddin Hassan), who constantly reminds Aiman to perform his prayers.

After losing his mother and experiencing a series of mishaps, Aiman can no longer bear his suffering. Underneath the pouring rain, he looks up to the sky and asks God to make his problems go away. What do you know, Aiman wakes up the next day and finds himself all alone in the world. Or at least, in his perception of reality.

While Aiman enjoys his solitude, his father files a missing person report and goes on a frantic search to find him. He even has his own Taken moment with a mysterious individual linked to Aiman’s disappearance.

This Ipoh man has been selling records for 40 years

Chen’s modest store houses a treasure trove of goodies, including vinyl LPs, cassettes, hi-fi knick knacks and erhus.

When the sound of the erhu emanates from a particular stretch of Pasar Besar Ipoh, Perak’s central market, that simply means Cheng Ah Lek is at his record store for a day’s work. The proprietor of Perniagaan Nanyang has been selling vinyl LPs for more than 40 years, having opened his first shop on Osborne Street (now Jalan Dato Tahwil Azhar) in 1974.

“I opened another shop in Yau Tet Shin market in 1984, but closed it two years later when I fell ill,” said the gregarious 74-year-old. Ultimately, the original Osborne Street store is what lasted longest, and Cheng was there until the turn of the millennium, when the owner of the lot eventually sold it.

This writer recalls visiting that store in the late 1990s and leaving with cartfuls of records on a number of occasions. With Chen having sold records for so long, he had an amazing inventory then.

According to him, he had tens of thousands of titles, though in the last 16 years, that volume has decreased tremendously. Good titles can still be had, from the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Bad Company, Deep Purple and BB King.

What’s great about Chen’s collection is the condition of his records … they are largely NOS (new old stock titles), effectively meaning, they are unplayed records. And there’s been a copy of 10cc’s Deceptive Bends sitting there for months now, just waiting for the right music lover to claim it.

When Connections Are Bad, They’re Bad

Can you remember a time when you needed to download something from the website and you were just staring at the estimated time left for the document to be downloaded?

Especially when the loading bar reached 99%… and the stupid internet connection gets disrupted.

We bet this is what you look like when that happens.

Sometimes, you even caught yourself pleading or making promises at the loading bar! Like, “OMG, there’s only another 5% left, if you reach 100%, I will never curse you ever again, I’ll even polish you!” Yeah, like it’s going to respond to your emotions and hurry up just to please you. Good try though, buddy.

Or perhaps, when you are studying abroad and you need to call your parents on Skype and the line is just horrendous. The call gets through, and you spend the next ten minutes saying “Hello, can you hear me?”. You try a few more times, saying hello. 10 minutes, now 30 – all your precious time wasted.

Anyway, fear not folks, we will share some tips on how to improve your internet speed.

A place in Malaysia you’ve probably never heard of : Bau, Sarawak

The people that live there

There are over 40 sub-ethnic groups in Sarawak and three main linguistic groups: Biatah, Singai-Jagoi, and Bukar and Sadong. In the Bau region located about 40 minutes from Kuching, the major sub-ethnic group are the Singai-Jagoi Bidayuhs. Bidayuh, which translates to ‘people of the land’, were formerly known as the Land Dayaks and they make up the second largest native ethnic group in Sarawak after the Ibans.

People of the Bidayuh tribe during the Gawai Dayak festival | Photo credit: CHEN WS / Shutterstock.com

Tribes in the Bau region are believe to have come from West Kalimantan some 700 years ago. In particular, the Jagoi-Bratak people chose to settle on top of Mount Bratak where they felt it was safe, and that actually held true for quite some time as the settlement was well fortified and flourished.

Kids, do you know what this is?

Before Spotify, people used to drive around listening to music on this relic, the car stereo.

Collectors and music fans wearing the T-shirts of obscure rock bands brave the tropical heat outside a record store near Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, waiting to get their hands on new cassette tapes.

No, this isn’t a flashback to the 1980s, but an event marking recent International Cassette Store Day, an annual celebration of a music format once thought headed for extinction but now enjoying a rebirth.

Vinyl’s renaissance is well-documented and now it seems cassettes are rising from the grave, with artists such as Kanye West and Justin Bieber releasing songs on tape.

In South-East Asia low production costs and a retro-cool image have made cassettes an underground-music fixture, especially for struggling bands getting their name out.

“Cassettes are our best sellers,” Mohammad Radzi Jasni, owner of the store, Teenage Head Records, said after shoving one by Singaporean surf-punk band Force Vomit into a bulky tape player.

“They are still the best way to discover new bands here. It’s very affordable for the guys releasing it and the fans buying them,” he added.

Manufacturing costs can be as low as RM4 per tape in Malaysia, compared to RM60 to RM80 for a vinyl record. Vinyl’s cost is a hurdle for young bands and DIY labels in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines.

How Small Businesses Can Prepare for Marketing in 2017

The best way to prepare mentally for marketing in 2017 is to start fresh, with a clean slate. For the moment, forget about what you accomplished and failed to accomplish with your marketing in 2016; set aside all the baggage of frustrations and disappointments you picked up along the way. Think as if you are starting from scratch and ask yourself: What is the one thing we must accomplish with marketing in 2017?

That is really the key question. Small businesses have limited resources -- limited funds and limited time -- so focus is of the essence! Many small businesses go around in circles with marketing because they dabble, trying to do a little bit of everything instead of trying to do one thing really well. Avoid this trap and you’ve already got a leg up on the competition going into 2017.

What Does Best Effort Mean In Broadband Service?

Fast Speed Internet

It never seems to end. Complaints about our broadband speed seem to be stacking up in all social media waves. Sometimes we’re surfing at top speed and other times we feel like throttling somebody’s neck when our surfing connection speed is throttled down.

Why are we having this problem? We complain to our service providers but we are still experiencing this problem from time to time. What is really going on?

Ok, remember when signing up for the broadband plan? Remember reading or coming across the words “best effort delivery”? Exactly. That’s why we’re in this scenario.

Our service providers try their best to deliver top speed as per mentioned in the package that we’ve signed up for.

However, best effort delivery of broadband service depends on factors such as modem capability, location, coverage, distance from communication towers and number of simultaneous users.

How to Manage Your Time on a Chaotic, Irregular Schedule

 

Not everyone works 9-5. When you schedule doesn't fit into neat little boxes, it can require some special skills to keep everything in order. Here are some tactics you can use to keep your energy up and maintain a bit of control.

In a past life, I worked as a video producer, writing, shooting, and editing short films. Anyone who's worked in this field for more than a day can tell you that regular hours are not something you keep. Some days you'll work 16 hours straight, other days you'll shoot for three hours in the middle of the night because that's the only time everyone's free. Developing skills to manage a chaotic schedule becomes incredibly important when you can't know when you're working from week to week (and, notably, these skills transfer very well to working multiple jobs and/or retail).