Here are my monthly financials for June 2021.
It is good to keep track and review your monthly financials so you can be in control of your finances.
Having a fixed income and knowing my expenses will not exceed my budget allowed me to not track my expenses before I left my job. I did not feel a need to track my finances strictly as I know I can control my spending. I only tracked my investments diligently.
Since I will not have a fixed source of income soon, I decided to start tracking my financials starting from January 2021. Money will be tight so I need to be extra prudent. This also helps generate content for my website.
Top 3 Income Sources
Allowance – S$800
S$600 is from my monthly SGUS allowance. This is the last payment that I will receive.
Without the allowance, my cash flow will probably be negative until I deploy my investment war chest.
S$200 is from my NS marksman award. My reservice in May had an indoor range and my whole company got marksman on the first try.
Other – S$179.90
S$170.90 is from my cut from handling EURO 2020 soccer bets for my relatives. Basically, I acted as a fund manager for them by executing bets based on a strategy. We did not last all the way till the Finals as our strategy did not account for the concurrent matches (two matches playing at the same time).
I will be publishing a blog post next week on my results and the strategy used.
S$9 is from selling some old coins that I had on Carousell.
Interest – S$139.86
This is made up of the coupon payments from Singapore Savings Bond and interest from Singlife.
Special Mention – Referal Income
I requested to be added to TheFinance.sg, a directory for all things finance, and my blog post on making money via surveys received some traffic. Some of the readers signed up and I got some points on Milieu and ApiaryBuzz.
I got a total of S$18.32 worth of points this month. I didn’t classify it as income this month as I have not redeemed the points. Once I redeem them, I will just classify them under Income – Surveys as it is troublesome to reclassify them.
Top 3 Expense Sources
Investment – S$200
This is my monthly investment of S$200 in STI ETF using POSB Invest-saver.
Groceries – S$105.68
This is for groceries I bought at Giant, NTUC and Kim Mart. I get frozen meat in bulk at very reasonable prices from Kim Mart every 3-4 months.
You can save more if you wait for them to have promotions that happen quite frequently. There was a Father’s Day discount coupon of 10% that allowed me to save more.
Health – S$75
I went to my first dental visit in almost 20 years at NTUC DentiCare. I currently have the Blue Chas Card so I managed to shave off S$71 off the total bill of S$146.
There are four tiers of payment for scaling and polishing ranging from S$50 – S$110 and I believe the tier charged is based on the amount of work done. Unsurprisingly, I got charged the highest tier of S$110. The S$75 price tag is still relatively reasonable as a Polyclinic visit will also cost S$50 – S$60.
On top of that, a Polyclinic dental session is limited to 20 minutes per session so I will probably need to go back twice as it took 40 – 50 minutes at NTUC Denticare. I wrote something on dental services in Singapore and you can read it here.
The price should hopefully be lower for my next visit as there is less sh*t to remove from my mouth.
Bonus Video – Inside Job
I leave you with this video now uploaded onto YouTube for free. It talks about what happened during the 2008 financial crisis. None of the bankers that created the mess got charged or went to jail. This video is still scarily relevant to this date. Is a bigger crash than ’08 coming?
Money Manager App
I am using an app called Money Manager to track my income and expenses. It is a free tool available on mobile available on Google Play Store and Apple App Store.
As far as I know, the data collected from the app is for tracking the ads you view and interact with on the app.
Please check out their privacy policy on what information they collect and what is it used for.
Personally, the value this app brings to me outweighs the value of the information I provide to them.
Comment and let me know what you think about tracking your finances.
