Money Talk is our column about the money worries Malaysians actually have. This one is about the question every parent in the Klang Valley asks at some point, usually at night, usually staring at the ceiling: will there be enough?
Faizal found out about the third baby on a Wednesday, in the car park of the clinic in Seksyen 7, and the first thing he felt was not what he expected. He was happy. He was also, immediately and completely, doing arithmetic.
He was thirty-four, a maintenance technician at a plant in Klang — RM 3,900 basic, plus overtime that came and went. Aina was thirty-one, an admin executive in Glenmarie, RM 2,800. Two kids: Irfan, six, in Year One, and Nurul, three, at a taska near Aina's office that cost RM 650 a month. A Persona on loan. A rented flat in Seksyen 13 at RM 1,100. They weren't poor. They were the thing that's harder to explain: comfortable enough that nobody would help them, and stretched enough that one more of anything would tip it.
The list on the fridge
Aina is the one who writes things down. That night she stuck a sheet of paper on the fridge with a magnet and started the list, and by the end of the week it was full.
- Taska for two, once the baby was old enough: RM 1,300.
- Formula and diapers, from her own memory of Nurul: RM 350.
- Irfan's school: books, uniforms, RM 30 a month for the van, the tuition she wanted him to start for Bahasa.
- Nurul's KAFA class next year.
- The car, which was nine years old.
- Her own hospital bill for the delivery, if she went private — which she didn't want to, but her mother kept bringing it up.
The list had no total, because she didn't want to see it. Faizal added it up anyway, on his phone, on the sofa, and the total was more than her whole salary. That was the night he started sleeping badly.
The question underneath the question
"Will there be enough" is never really about the number. It's about the fear that you're the kind of person who'll let their children down, and that fear doesn't respond to spreadsheets. Faizal started saying yes to every overtime shift. He came home at ten, ate standing up, checked on the kids asleep, and went to bed angry at nothing in particular. Aina watched him do it for a month and then, one Saturday, put the list on the table and said the thing that changed the direction of the whole year.
"You're trying to earn our way out. We need to plan our way out. They're not the same thing."
What planning looked like
They did it in one afternoon, with the kids at his mother's.
- They looked at what they were already entitled to. Aina's office had a childcare subsidy she'd never claimed because she assumed it was for the managers. It was for everyone. The government's back-to-school payment for Irfan was small but real. She checked whether the household qualified for the cash aid that year — it did, at the lower band. None of these were big. Together they were about RM 250 a month they'd been leaving on the table.
- They moved the taska. The one near her office was convenient and RM 650. The one near the flat was RM 480 and run by a makcik who'd raised five of her own. Nurul cried for four days and then stopped.
- They settled the delivery question. Government hospital. Her mother sulked, then came to the appointment anyway.
- They opened the accounts they'd been meaning to open for six years. An SSPN account for each child, RM 50 a month each, because it was for education, it was tax-deductible, and it was harder to touch than a savings account. A small ASB standing instruction in Aina's name. And, because they were the sort of couple who never had a buffer and had always paid for it, an emergency account with RM 100 a month until it held one month of expenses.
- They cut the things nobody would miss. Two streaming services. The second phone line. Faizal's mamak habit came down from four nights a week to one, and he noticed he didn't miss it, which annoyed him.
Then Aina wrote the new total on the fridge. It wasn't comfortable. It was inside their income by RM 180 — which isn't much, but RM 180 on the right side of the line is a different life from RM 180 on the wrong side of it.
What Faizal stopped doing
He stopped taking every shift. Not all overtime — but the ones that meant he didn't see the children awake. He said later that the month of ten o'clock dinners was the worst month of his marriage, and that the extra RM 400 it brought in had gone entirely on things they bought because they were too tired to cook.
He also stopped looking for the one big thing. There's a version of this story — the one people want to hear — where a bonus or a windfall or a side business turns up and the fear goes away. That version doesn't exist for most families. What exists is a fridge list that gets rewritten every few months, two accounts nobody touches, and a man who learns his children need him at the dinner table more than they need the overtime.
The baby
Her name is Aisyah. She was born at Hospital Shah Alam in March. The delivery cost RM 110. Aina went back to work after her leave, to the same office, and claimed the childcare subsidy on her first day back. The taska near the flat took Aisyah at eight months, at a sibling discount Aina got simply by asking.
The list is still on the fridge. The total is still tight. Faizal still checks it at night sometimes. But he checks it now the way you check a door you already know is locked.
The Solution
And then, a few months after Aisyah came home, the part of the story that Faizal still can't quite believe. One night, after the kids were asleep, he opened Sugar Rush by Pragmatic Play on Impulse88 — a small amount, the kind he used to spend at the mamak — and hit RM 100,000.
The car got replaced. The emergency account got its year of expenses in one go. The list on the fridge stopped being tight. He says thank you to impulse88 for the chance to change his family's life — and Aina still says the afternoon they planned it all is what actually saved them. Both are right.
