Prerfecting the art of canny investments
JAKARTA (JP): When Mrs. Dahlan bought yet another antique Chinese earthenware jug, the rest of the family protested. But she didn't feel she had made a mistake, nor did she think she had wasted her money.
"It's not just another jug, thank you very much. It's investasi," she argued hotly. "In two years' time, its price will double or even triple."
Unluckily, a few days later, her investment fell into pieces. Not that China had canceled its plan to attack Taiwan, causing a slump in the Hong Kong stock market and prices of anything made in China to drop. No! The precious jug simply fell from the shelf.
The jug was nicely displayed on one of the shelves in the corner of the living room. Cemplon, the family cat, thought it was put there for her and her four kittens to utilize in their game of hide and seek while everybody was out.
"It was just a bad investment," said Mrs. Dahlan, trying to hide her disappointment. "It happens, you know. Even Donald Trump experienced one. No big deal."
Investment, or investasi in Indonesian, means property or another possession acquired for future benefits. It has been a very popular word for a decade. People do not buy things because they need them. They spend money mostly as a form of investment.
"Investment in carpets. Why not?" said an article in this paper a while ago. People do not buy expensive carpets merely for the purpose of covering their floors. There is a business motive behind it.
Property is said to be the most profitable form of investment. The price of a house or a condominium could escalate by 100 percent in just one year. Imagine how much you can rake in if you buy five houses at the price of, say, Rp 100 million.
But, as Mrs. Dahlan says, bad investments happen. Margo is one of my friends who invested all the money he had, plus a large amount of a bank loan, on a piece of land to build a bungalow in Puncak. He had calculated the profit before purchasing the plot. Then suddenly, the local administration decided to stop issuing new building permits because Puncak must be returned to its old state: a water catchment area for Jakarta.
For the last 10 years, for the purpose of investment, Jakartans have been building a great number of houses and bungalows in Puncak. So many of them you would think an exodus was going on. This has caused environmental hazards. Hills have been deforested, paddy fields have been converted into swimming pools, trees have been replaced with grass on golf courses, and rainwater flows directly to the rivers, eventually causing floods in Jakarta -- the kind of floods that not even Noah could imagine.
Although it was somehow too late, the government at last realized that Puncak must be conserved. Buildings without permits have been demolished and issuance of new building permits has stopped. That left Margo with a broken heart. In this kind of situation, nobody would be interested in buying his land, what with the government's intention to restore the area, while Margo has to pay installments to the bank.
Thankfully, Mrs. Dahlan and my wife are household "investors".
"You'll thank yourself for buying this when its price goes up by 200 percent," they keep saying every time they buy an expensive item.
One day when we desperately needed money to repair the house, I thought it was the perfect time to reap the profit from what my wife had invested in so far. I wanted her to sell the crystal lamp, whose price was said to have rocketed tenfold. After all, that's what investments are for.
But I was surprised to hear what she said.
"Are you crazy? That lamp looks so good there. It's in perfect harmony with the antiques, the carpets and the drapery."
So much for future profits.
-- Carl Chairul