Today is actually my favorite day of the year (not my birthday, not any day) but it is not due to being NYE but actually it is the last day of the year.
In Feb 2016, I began my journey to track all my expenses and I’ve been really diligent in doing it, I am proud to say my tracking has minimal error (definitely less than ETF’s tracking, lol). I’ve also progressed slightly as a human, cutting corners on some of the tracking to make my own life easier;
- track top-up to Grab wallet as “Food Expense”, save effort on tracking Grab as a separate wallet (inclusive of YouTrip/Revolut/etc)
- put aside a small wallet for hawker food where I “top-up” physical cash
- no longer count the small cashback/promo on my expense, I just look at it as bonus money in my “Expenditure” bank account
Disclaimer: I don’t track my expenses to limit myself but for me to know where my money is going to, and from there I can forecast a budget for the upcoming year.
In addition to easing my tracking, I also lessen the categories to make life easier thus the above categories. As it is still my first post, I will go through the rationale of my grouping. Basic (Food/Groceries, Transport, House/Personal), I view these as the basic need to my life. While I put the excess (Travel/Entertain, Shopping/Misc) as something that is more controllable. Lastly, I don’t really include Insurance and Mortgage (pardon the typo) into my basic expenses mainly due to I view these as future asset/needs, and by no means have any control in them as well.
Basic (Food/Groceries, Transport, House/Personal)
As you can see that my food/groceries expenses are pretty high, as my current enjoyment in life is mainly in eating (my goal is to go to any restaurant and not care the price tag while ordering), so I’ll allocate high budget to this category; taking into consideration of inflation and increasing standard of living, I accounted for a slight increment. Transport is one of the best performer in the budget but it was due to 3 months worth of Circuit Breaker (Singapore locked down) that I am able to WFH thus transport expense is less than SGD20 in these 3 months; while I budgeted for this year with the thought that I can still buy student concession fare till August, thus I’d keep the same budget for next year and see how it goes. Lastly, on house/personal, it ranges from the monthly contribution I put at home along with personal therapy, medical and etc. However, start of the year was harsh.. as my kitten required some excess vet support which caused it to go over budget (no regret there, hope you’re having fun at the rainbow bridge my lovely kitten) as well as some household goods breaking down; going forward I reckon chances of such one-off expenditure will not incur (touch wood) thus the lower budget.
Excess Expenditure (Travel/Entertain, Shopping/Misc)
While I budgeted quite a fair bit of travel, I only managed to visit Johore Bahru (JB) once due to the Covid19 pandemic but I plan to set aside similar budget for next year, hoping that travel might resume in 2021Q3. On another note, my shopping expense has overshot the budget (2 years straight) but this year was mainly due to a one-off purchase of my new phone at SGD1k which I expect to last me for a minimum of 3 years (based on my iPhone 7 lifespan). Honestly I feel that the budget is slightly higher than what I really need, but I’d love to buy things from sales (especially work shirt, etc).
Expense Wrap-Up
This year, surprisingly I am in the green (thanks to Covid19), however I still plan to set aside a higher budget; not to restraint myself too much and I also got a pay bump from job hop. Ultimately, my goal is total less “mortgage&insurance” can factor less than a certain percentage of my basic take-home pay (currently in 40~50% range, not revealing because it will be easy to reverse engineer my gross); goal will be eventually hitting less than 25% of my take home through both way of earning more money and spending less.
“Don’t let what you earn dictates how much you spend” -Me
Tracking App
I understand there’s many apps out there that will help with your tracking including app from Seedly, Gpay (allows you to track all expenses that is paid via card etc), banking apps and etc. Personally I use Monny, I like the flexibility and ease of usage of the app. Few note-worthy points are; allow you to create multiple accounts (for different accounts such as investment/spending/travel expenditure), create of categories, and recurring expenses. You can find the app in the following link – https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.greamer.monny.android
Disclaimer: I am not sponsored to share the app, nor I will get any referral fees from this.
And Happy New Year to everyone, hopefully 2021 will be a better year to achieve all of our goals!
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