Citibank Taiwan Ltd (花旗台灣) yesterday launched a mortgage plan for double-income couples, allowing them to deduct the balances of their separate saving accounts from the sum used to calculate interest.
“The more a couple saves, the lower their interest payments,” company vice president Michelle Yu (余苑菱) said.
For example, if a couple with a NT$6 million (US$185,000) mortgage has a total of NT$1 million in their saving accounts, they will only be charged daily interest for NT$5 million, the bank said.
Compared to rivals that offer similar options, Yu said the bank’s plan allows a couple to keep their financial independence by having two separate saving accounts instead of one.
“Although [the plan has] a higher nominal [mortgage] rate, the real interest rate can be the lowest [among all lenders], depending on the total balance of a couple’s savings accounts,” Jeanie Ho (何金妮), a vice president of the bank’s mortgage marketing department, told a media briefing.
The bank’s nominal rates average around 2 percent, slightly higher than the market average of 1.8 percent, she said.
For a 20-year NT$6 million mortgage, borrowers could save NT$748,222 if the couple deposits NT$27,000 each month into each of their accounts, with a balance of NT$400,000, translating into a real interest rate of 0.66 percent, the bank said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy