What Happen If You Are Unable To Track Your Expenses

Hi Everyone,

As you have notice, for the last few months, I am unable to produce my expenses results due to forgetfulness and also tight schedule due to wedding and moving into my new house (there are tons of things to do, so if you are at that stage, do note that it will take a lot of your time).

Understanding the fact that tracking of expenses can be quite tough as the days goes by, especially if you have other things to focus on, you will slowly neglect this activity. So some of the readers might feel that this will disrupt your saving journey and will eventually lead to overspending. This concern is legit because not many people can control their spending (including myself) without the help/assist of tools (tracking expenses tools).

So what can we do to solve this issue?

There are a few methods that I have suggested previously which can be useful in tackling this issue.

1) Having a Spending Account and a Saving Account

When you start working, do remember the first thing to do is to apply for two bank account, one is for saving and another one is for spending. So my friends asked me before, having two accounts is quite troublesome so why not just put it in one account instead?

Putting all your money in one account is convenient but it will be convenient for them to overspend as well. For your saving account, go for those account which gives high interest and for spending account, it would be best if can go for account without minimum sum required (but it's quite hard, so have to maintain $500 in the account)

2) Credit Card Limit

If you depend on credit card for your spending, there is a way to control it which is specify your credit limit. Like myself, my credit card spending limit is $1,000 per month. This will ensure that I will not overspend and eat into my savings.

Certainly, putting a limit can be restrictive especially if you are purchasing big ticket items like furniture, ring and etc. So if you really need to purchase big ticket item, get another credit card, and that credit card can only be use if and only if you are purchasing big ticket item. (And don't let your wife hold on to that card... if you know what I mean hahaha)

3) Allowance

The final method is to live like a student, as I have mention in my previous post, live like a student and draw allowance daily ($10 to $15 per day) before you start your day. This will ensure you that you only have that sum of money to spend everyday, so you won't exceed your monthly expenses.


So, with these methods (choose either one or choose those applicable ones, all if needed) you can skip the chores to keep track of your expenses.

5 Things Learnt When Dealing With Cost Management for Wedding

Hi Everyone!

As I am in the process of preparing for my wedding, which is at the end of this year, and also I have come across a few blog post about wedding budget, with that I shall share my humble opinion on the topic of Cost Management for Wedding Budget.

As many people have mention, wedding is a once in a lifetime event so some couple will spend quite a sum of money to have a grand wedding with hundreds of guests attending the ceremony. Of course, this is not wrong, who wouldn't want a memorable wedding that the couple can remember. However, it is also important to understand their own financial capability before making any hasty decision.

So with that mention, many people will think that we should have a proper plan for the wedding so that we can maintain our budget to a certain limit. This is a correct approach as it can help the couple to monitor the expenses and not going over their financial limits. Many financial bloggers have pointed out the needs to have a proper planning and scope for wedding.

However, in my opinion, things usually don't follow what has been planned. The reason is because there might be some unexpected situation like the location not available, your parent intend to invite more friends and etc. This can really kill your budget faster than you thought. 

Based on my personal experience, such unexpected situation can really happen. However, you shouldn't panic when you encounter such situation. Because the more you panic, the more confuse you will get and this will lead to making wrong decision. lucky for my wife and I, we were pretty calm when such situation occur whereby our ROM location was not ready for us to use and we will have to find alternative place for our ROM. Although the cost is pretty high (1K++) but we are able to maintain our budget without exceeding it.

The reason why we are able to achieve that is because during the planning process, I have allocated some buffer (which we can afford) in the wedding expenses. Because I knew that at some point of time, something unexpected will happen. So I decided to go ahead with adding some buffer in our expenses.

So the lesson that I have learnt is that whatever financial planning or budgeting that you do, it would be best to add in some buffer just in case some unexpected situation happen. Because not all the things will go according to your plan (if not you can buy lottery hahaha).

So these are the few things that I have learn during the process of wedding preparation

1. Always prepare a budget before you start your wedding preparation
2. Always Prepare for Plan B and even Plan C
3. Set some buffer to cater for unexpected situation
4. Be calm when dealing with unexpected situation
5. Always monitor and update your expenses

Not sure if you agree with my point of view, do share with me what are the things that I might have missed out as I am still in the process of wedding preparation.

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. 

May 2016 - Expenses Result

Hi Everyone!

As promised, I will lay down my expenses for this month to see how much I fare for this month. So the result is as below. Other than Entertainment (exceed by 50 cents), the rest of the category are still working quite well. Of course, for this chart, the month of May might be a bit off because I officially started off a bit late. So as part of a trial for this financial saving web that I created, I will provide a more realistic result from next month onwards.

However, I am still happy with the result because other than bills (which I left out around $80 due to early entry), the rest seems to be quite stable. For this month, I am quite happy with the result.

Based on the graph above, my expenses break down are as below:

1) Travel: $120 (Planned) VS $120 (Actual) - I bought adult concession so the amount is fixed

2) Food (Weekday): $160 (Planned) VS $80 (Actual)

3) Bills: $120 (Planned) VS $29.90 (Actual) But if we add the $80 bill in should be around $109.90

4) Entertainment: $120 (Planned) VS $120.50 (Actual)

5) Others: $580 (Planned) VS $465.96 (Actual)

Overall: $1,100 (Planned) VS $896.36 (Actual)

That is awesome for me to achieve this result and certainly I can look forward to save even more however, there is wedding expenses that I need to take into consideration. But overall, I am happy with the result as I have achieve what I have set for myself.

So this is the report card that I have produced for this month, hope June will be a better month for me.