FINANCIAL PLANNING SEMINAR (THIRD DAY).

After today, I finally finished my Financial Planners Program (FPP). Today, I learnt about Estate Planning. Estate Planning is the most interesting subject in Financial Planning Seminar (FPS).

The speaker who was from AIA Berhad told us a lot of real stories on how badly people will behave when they are discussing the portion they will get from the distribution of their parent's wealth. We can image the real stories by watching the Hong Kong dramas such as 溏心風暴 (Heart Of Greed) and 溏心風暴之家好月圓 (Moonlight Resonance). At first, some people will cry because of their parent's death. However, when their lawyer comes and announces the contents of their parent's will, the first thing they want to know is how much they will get from their parent's will.

From the seminar, I learnt that having a will is very important in our life but it is not the end of the story. Most people including me generally presume that our assets will be automatically transferred to our loved ones after our demise. Unfortunately, there is no such law in Malaysia. Once a person dies, his assets will be frozen immediately even with a will and the frozen assets are known as an estate. Once assets become an estate, it can't be transferred to his loved ones although he has a will until his liabilities like tax, personal loan and borrowing have been settled by his family. We still have to settle our liabilities even though we are no longer around. From here, I know that we can't escape ourselves from paying tax. We can only minimize our tax payment in legal ways. Some people may think that they can transfer all of their assets to their children early before they are no longer around. However, many people are sent to old folks' home after their assets have been transferred to their so-called obedient children. So, we must think carefully when we want to transfer our assets to other people before it is too late.