Participant Feedback
These are accounts from individuals and households who have attended a Fjord Office programme. They are shared with consent, in participants' own words, and have not been edited for tone.
← Back to Home7+
Years running
340+
Participants
4.7/5
Average rating
0
Products sold or referred
Reviews
Siti Rahimah
Gelugor, Penang
Yearly Review Workshop
I attended in April and came away with a completed review for the year — something I had been putting off for a long time. The template itself is the most useful part. It forces you to look at your EPF figures alongside your actual monthly spending, and the comparison is sometimes uncomfortable in a productive way. I have already blocked the date for next year's session.
March 2025
Tan Kheng Wei
Bayan Lepas, Penang
Understanding Investment Fees
The session on how fees compound over thirty years genuinely changed how I look at my unit trust holdings. I had never done the arithmetic properly. What surprised me most was not the numbers themselves but how difficult it was to find them in the fund documents — and the programme taught me exactly where to look. Worth every ringgit.
February 2025
Ahmad Faris & wife
Air Itam, Penang
Multi-Year Household Plan
We did the four-month engagement in late 2024. The pace felt slow at first — the gap between sessions seemed long — but by the time we reached the closing review we understood why. We arrived at the final session with much clearer thinking than we would have had the whole thing been compressed into a week. The written plan we have now is something we actually refer back to.
January 2025
Lim Mei Fen
Tanjung Tokong, Penang
Yearly Review Workshop
I had expected something more like a financial seminar — slides, a speaker, passive listening. It was not that at all. Most of the day is spent actually filling in the template using your own numbers. I found the insurance section harder than I expected because I realised I did not fully understand what cover I had. That alone was a useful outcome.
March 2025
Rajeshwari Nair
Seberang Jaya, Penang
Understanding Investment Fees
I joined because I had been in the same unit trust for seven years without really understanding what I was paying. The three sessions were thorough without being overwhelming. What I appreciated was that nothing was recommended — there was no pressure to switch anything. It was genuinely educational, which I did not expect from something marketed as financial education.
April 2025
Zulaikha Hassan
Butterworth, Penang
Multi-Year Household Plan
My husband and I had been avoiding a proper conversation about our finances for years — not because of conflict, but because neither of us felt equipped to structure it. The engagement gave us the structure and a neutral setting. The listening session was particularly useful: having someone ask careful questions made us articulate things we had only half-thought through. The resulting plan is genuinely ours.
February 2025
Case Studies
Case Study 01 — Yearly Review Workshop
The situation
A 38-year-old engineer from Penang Technology Park had been contributing to EPF for fourteen years without ever looking at his account balance, contribution rate, or the split between Account 1 and Account 2. He had no clear picture of his annual cash flow and had not reviewed his insurance coverage since taking out a policy at 27.
The programme
He attended the October Yearly Review Workshop. Using the seven-page template, he worked through his full-year cash flow, logged his actual EPF balances and projected Account 1 availability at 55, reviewed his active insurance policies line by line, and listed obligations due in the next 18 months. The day took approximately 7 hours including breaks.
What changed
He discovered his critical illness cover had lapsed six months earlier without his noticing. His cash flow review showed monthly outgoings were RM 400 higher than he had estimated. He described the workshop as "less comfortable than I expected, which is probably the point." He attended again in April of the following year.
Case Study 02 — Understanding Investment Fees
The situation
A secondary school teacher in her mid-40s had three separate unit trust investments, each suggested by a different person over different years. She was contributing monthly to all three but had never compared the fee structures, could not locate the annual management charges in the documents she had been given, and did not know the difference between front-end loads and ongoing charges.
The programme
She attended the Understanding Investment Fees programme over three sessions. She brought her fund documents to each session. By session two she was able to locate the ongoing charges figure for each fund and construct a simple projection of what each fund's fees would cost her over a 20-year horizon, expressed in both percentage and ringgit terms.
What changed
She did not immediately change any of her investments — but she said she now understood what she was in and could ask better questions at her next adviser meeting. "I went in knowing I was paying fees. I came out knowing how much, which is different." She noted the programme did not tell her what to do, which she found appropriate.
Case Study 03 — Multi-Year Household Plan
The situation
A dual-income household in their late 30s, both professionals in Penang, had significant monthly income but no written plan. They disagreed on how much to allocate toward the mortgage versus other savings and had not resolved whether to fund their children's education through PRS or a separate savings account. The tension was not conflict — it was absence of a shared framework.
The programme
They went through the four-month engagement together. The listening session took two hours and surfaced several financial priorities neither had stated clearly to each other. The working sessions produced a five-year cashflow model using their actual figures, a prioritised list of medium-term goals, and a risk-tolerance discussion that resolved the education funding disagreement.
What changed
They left with a 22-page written plan covering the next five years, with annual checkpoints. "Having it written down meant we were no longer arguing from different assumptions." They returned for the Yearly Review Workshop twelve months later to assess how the plan was tracking. The plan itself was not prescriptive — it was a framework they could adapt as circumstances changed.
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Saturday workshops by programme schedule
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