Since then it has been made into a widget and anyone can include this info at their own blog / web site by following some simple instruction here.
It is NOT easy to simply pick a number out of the long list of available choices and call it Best rate. Furthermore, there are so many considerations and factors that it is almost imposible for other people to 'decide' which rate is the BEST rate for you. Hence, lets review why and how malpf makes its list.
Fix Deposit is a finance tool you use when you have a sum of money that you will NOT be using for a while and you can gain Higher saving interest than normal saving account. So the higher the rate the better it is. Hence the interest rate is mark in blue color.
One of the greatest pit fall in FD is that if you withdraw before its maturity date, you may lose your interest or even have to pay penalty to it - liquidity problem. On another aspect, its best to increase the frequency of 'taking' the interest and put in back into the FD itself to enjoy the power of compounding interest. Hence keeping these 2 in mind (liquidity and compound interest), 1 month FD is the better choice compare to other longer term FD even if longer term FD may give higher return. Choosing compound more frequent with lower rate is better than locking the fund with a rate that seems high today.
Hence when comparing FD rate, 1 month FD is used and the higher the rate is the better.
BLR or Base Lending Rate is another important number where most of the variable loan will use as the reference loan rate. The lower this number is, the better it is. Hence the rate is marked with RED color. Just to add a note that business loan can benefit more from lower BLR than housing loan.
Saving account is one of the hardest ones to compare due to its large variation in future. There are junior and senior accounts, ordinary and islamic accounts etc. However, if we focus on the fundamental of saving account, it is a finance tool to 'temporary' keep our money to maintain our cash flow, ie. day to day liquidity. So the ease of interest calculation is important and we shall focus mainly on working adults ( Not Junior Nor Senior accounts ). For ease of calculation, multi-tier rates are less welcome. Certain accounts who impose minimum amount before paying interest is also less welcome. After considering these factors, we can pick the highest interest rate as the Best Rate (in blue).
Lastly is House Loan, which is also a very tough call for Best Rate. However, borrowing principals from saving accounts, multi-tier rates are less favorable here. Getting 1-2 years of Zero interest by committing to potentially high rate in future is NOT exactly a great way to go. Therefore malpf only concentrates on the simplest BLR-X% where the Higher the X is the Better it is, ( blue )
Among all other best rates, house loan best rate may be the least influencing one because all other considerations like Zero Moving Cost and the most recent flexi all in one account, overdraft without the overdraft rate feature makes it really tough to generalize their good and bad.
Alright, thats the start of why and how these rates are choosen.
Check out below on some of the new Best Rates too, some of them may be useful to some people too ... ie.
FD12mth : 12 months Fix Deposit for those who are really sure will not touch those money for a year
Save1mil : Saving account that has MORE than 1 million in it
Save15k : Saving account thas has MORE than RM 15,000 in it
iSave : Islamic Saving account
UsedCarL : Car Loan rate for used cars
