0 My First Home Scheme - A scheme to scam the average Joe?

If you want to help the young people of today, then you really have to look at the old people of tomorrow.

And there's really nothing to look forward to if you're the average person because years from now, you won't be sitting on that rocking chair, tending your garden and smelling the roses. Equally gone are dreams of a cruise to the Caribbean islands. Your days will be spent counting dollars and cents, earned from a low paying part time job you took out of desperation.

In days of yore, you could own a two-storey bungalow at RM20k, with a measly household income of RM600 per month. My parents are living proof of a bank loan repaid in ten years. They were free to save for rainy days, our education and their retirement, with a solid fifteen years of full employment life to go. 

If you're planning to jump onto the "My First Home Scheme" bandwagon, then you should know what you're getting into - possibly a lifelong struggle to make ends meet.

A thirty year loan eats into your ability to build a comfortable nest egg for yourself and part of your retirement savings effectively becomes a debt repayment fund. To top it off, not even the amount in your EPF can carry you through the many years you have left in you, a fact in the now. 

Tomorrow, you'll be fretting over the monthly fees you have to fork out for security and maintenance, because you live in a community where theft boasts a higher performance rating against the men in blue and you fancied the private landscaped park, tended by a professional gardener over DBKL's maniacal tree cutters.

Rising costs are a thing of permanence, but rising salaries are not. Sudah retirelar, mana ada salary. That nasi lemak will never cost RM0.50 again, just as petrol prices continue to climb.

You're the Starbucks generation with an eye for good food, who's now laden with the "in" in health problems - diabetes, hypertension, obesity which your medical insurance does not cover or because you did not have the financial means to take up a good policy.

I'm not asking that the recently launched "My First Home Scheme" be scrapped completely, but let it be improved towards something markedly better and let it be tweaked to a point where there are concrete plans that a certain percentage of homes will be priced realistically to meet the average person's salary scale.

It's a great scheme assuming nothing in the negative befalls the borrower, or if you live and work in a place where time stood still. Naive assumptions that you will never be unemployed for any period of time during the thirty years or that you're guaranteed a high-paying job in the workplace can cost you.

A scheme that does not benefit the average person for real, is a scam by scheming people who come out with superficial solutions to appease negative public sentiments on the current affairs of home ownership.