u/faizfizy39

About ten years ago, during my fresh grad era and after getting a taste of my own money, I started exploring what to do with my extra money. One of the things I came across was ASBF.

What I noticed was that most discussions online were very polarizing. People were either totally against ASBF or strongly pro-ASBF.

Unsurprisingly, many of the people promoting ASBF were bankers or agents, so it was hard to trust the information completely since they were technically selling a product. But people who claimed ASBF was "rugi" didn't really have concrete arguments either.

Since the variables are mostly constant, except for the dividend rate which may fluctuate, once you understand the concept and the calculations behind it, it's actually quite straightforward to simulate ASBF returns.

At that time I was also picking up dev skills, so I decided to build a simple web tool to calculate ASBF returns and ended up with a small ASBF planner for my own use. Over time, I kept improving it and deployed it online.

It basically simplify:

• Reducing Balance financing calculations
• Annual dividend compounding projections
• Optional takaful inclusion
• Early termination simulations

There were a few things that surprised me while analysing the numbers at that time:

• With the same monthly payment, a longer tenure can potentially generate a higher overall return than a shorter tenure.
• If the bank financing rate = dividend rate, you can still profit, but you'd generally be better off saving directly into ASB instead as the return will be higher.
• You can gain up to ~30% if you terminate ASBF just after a year, under certain scenarios.

I'm sharing the calculator here in case anyone else is evaluating ASBF and wants to test different scenarios for themselves:

https://calculator.faizfizy.com/asbf

It's free to use.

Would appreciate any feedback, especially from those who have utilise ASBF or are currently holding one. What assumptions do you think most people have on ASBF?

Disclaimer: After discovering that ASBF is useful for me, I advised it to most of my peers and housemates at the time. Eventually, I become a part-time ASBF agent. So yeah, I’m still an agent today. Looking back, I am grateful to find out about ASBF so I'm sharing the calculator because I think it can help people make a more informed decision.

TL;DR: I built an ASBF calculator to help determine whether ASBF actually makes or loses money. And it helps me build my base savings fund.