Here is a number worth sitting with: according to EPF’s own data, a significant portion of Malaysian members aged 54 have less than RM10,000 in their accounts.
Not RM10,000 a month. RM10,000 total.
For retirement. In a country where the cost of living has been quietly outrunning wages for years, that number is not an anomaly, it is the norm.
And what happens when the savings run out? Typically, the children pay.
Father drained his EPF
This is the unspoken contract embedded in Malaysian family culture, that children will step in where EPF falls short, that a son’s salary is also his parents’ safety net, that a new daughter-in-law signs up for this too, whether she knew it or not.
Most of the time, this arrangement stays behind closed doors. Last week, one woman decided to put it on Threads.
User carrock2014 shared online her father-in-law who she later clarified is actually 49, not 55 (she hid his real age initially) announced to the family that he was broke. KWSP gone. No savings.
His son, her husband, was already covering the house. And yet: a brand-new car appeared, because apparently the old Kancil, still perfectly functional, had been around for over 20 years.
Big appetite for a man with no income. He lives in the house rent-free. Won’t touch the utility bills. At 65, he now works as a security guard, not out of choice, but because without the job, there’s simply no money coming in.
FIL’s financial situation at a glance
FIL pressured son to buy his landed house, then claimed it was still his
It gets more layered. The FIL owned a landed terrace house. Instead of letting the newlyweds rent while they found their footing, he pushed the husband to buy it outright, then continued referring to it as his own house.
The woman and her husband ended up buying a flat separately just to have some privacy, while the in-laws lived on in the landed property under the husband’s loan.
And then, after years of the couple quietly absorbing the costs; road tax, grocery bills, utility payments, hotel stays, overseas trips, all coming out of her own pocket, the FIL dropped a revelation: he had always planned to claim his faraid share of the house. Inheritance under Islamic law. The loan was in the husband’s name. The house, the FIL felt, was still partially his to distribute.
It wasn’t until five years in that I asked my husband to find out what was happening with the house, since his name was on it. That’s when the father-in-law revealed he wanted his share distributed as faraid (Islamic inheritance).”
She also shared that before the terrace house situation, the FIL had previously owned a flat which he sold to her husband one month before their wedding.
He wasn’t always broke. He just kept moving money downward and calling it family arrangements.
If there was a Sale and Purchase Agreement
One commenter asked the practical question first: was there a sale and purchase agreement?
The woman confirmed the house is legally under her husband’s name, but no formal SPA was drawn up with the in-laws. They simply moved in. Stayed. Didn’t leave.
Another commenter, offered a blunt prescription: if the father in law still has EPF at 50, make them use it toward the house. If they refuse, the husband should sell the property back.
View on Threads
