Monday, July 11, 2016

What To Do If You Are Too Lazy To Keep Track Of Your Expenses?

Hi Everyone!


In order to build your own passive income, it is always important to save more money while you are working so that you can invest those savings into different instruments for good returns. So in order to build your own portfolio, you will need more money in order to generate decent amount of passive income to support your monthly expenses, in order word, achieving financial independence. 



So most of the people would suggest to start monitoring your own expenses in order to achieve your monthly saving goals. At the start, you might be able to diligently keeping track of your expenses however, it might died down after a certain period of time (I have to admit that I, myself have experience this kind of situation before). 

So I asked myself, what should I do in order to maintain my expenses while not keeping track of it?

Well, there is a way to do that and we use to do that when we are in schools (especially in primary and secondary school), do you have any idea on how to do that yet?

Live like a Student and Save like a student

So there are a few things that you need to do because after all adults and children/teenager are different as adult, we have liabilities that we need to take care of, like house debt, bills and etc. So there are a few things that you need to do!

Set aside some of the money for fixed expenses

So, before you start your saving journey, do make sure that you write down all your fixed expenses and set this amount of money at one side in order to pay for your fixed expenses. This is rather simple and straight forward.

Note down the monthly expenses that you would spend

Before you start living like a student, set your target monthly expenses for your travel, food and entertainment. This is important because this is the sum of money that you will be spending for the month without touching the rest of your income.

Split your income into various account

Once you have listed down your fixed expenses, monthly personal expenses and savings, split them into different account for segregation.

Set daily allowance for yourself

So after the splitting is done, now is time to live like a student! If you recall, when we were a student, we used to receive allowance from our parents for weekly or daily expenses. So now you will have to live like a student, set a daily allowance for yourself. For example, your daily allowance is $10, so you will have to go to the bank to receive your $10 allowance at the start of each day. This will ensure that you won't overspend and you will be able to maintain your monthly expenses and you do not need to diligently keeping track of your expenses.

So what do you think of this strategy? I will be adopting this strategy after I settle my down payment for my condo next year. So if you find that keeping track of expenses is not your style, do try this method. 

4 comments:

  1. May be like me just dedicated one bank for all expenditures and at the first week of the month download the bank statement. Insert a new Excel tab. Copy and paste. in less than 10 mins; it is updated in graphical and table form. :-)

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    1. Hi,

      I do keep track of my expenditure as well, and you are right, delicate one bank account for expenses is a good way of controlling your expenses. I am now partially on this track as my expenses account still contains my savings as well (leveraging on the high interest rate for UOB account) for purchasing my house next year

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  2. I have a personal habit of throwing away things. So I avoid buying things unless I am really into it for at least mid/long term. I do buy or change things out for efficiency and knowledge. eg. computer upgrades. Recently out of curiosity i installed monefy to track my expenses and use it for 2 months. Not unexpected results. Good amount of saving. I have it uninstalled afterwards since is not a problem.

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    1. Hi Cory,

      I also face this issue of purchasing something that I do not really need when I was young (purchased expensive laptop, mobile phones, games and etc.) Now I really cut down on those expenses by purchasing something that is good for me to use (cheap laptop, cheap hp and etc)

      I created my own tracking tools for my savings and expenses as well, previously I used some apps to keep track of my expenses but after awhile, I stop updating it. Which is why it keeps me thinking of alternative way of dealing such problem because I believe that I am not the only one who stop using the expenses tracking app after a short while.

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