You’re familiar with monthly expenses. The biggest chunks are usually Accommodation+Transportation+Food. Plus Loan Repayments for some people.
How about annual expenses? Are you already familiar with yours? These are the payments that you make only once a year, or once every few years.
While I have never been truly broke, I’ve had moments when money was tight. It became necessary to save money. It became necessary to allocate where each ringgit should go.
Therefore this guide. Here I’ve compiled all the strategies you can use to get through moments when you’re tight with money. To make things clear and actionable, I have divided the strategies into categories.
Remember that:
I track my spending. All of it. In an app. Each purchase gets categorised – for example, rent money goes under the ‘Rent’ category and Tesco bill goes under the ‘Groceries’ category.
One of the categories is ‘Misc Needs’ – things that I have to buy anyway, but they don’t occur often enough to have their own category. They tend to be ‘money emergencies’. For example, things I have to fix or replace. But they’re also things I *have* to do, like haircuts.
I just want to share my observations about my spending patterns in this budget category.
I notice that these things happen to people who are good with money. Not saying I’m that great (OK OK only), but I try. They are based on personal experience and anecdotes collected from various personal finance-related forums, blogs and other sources online.
These are meant to be humourous, so don’t take them too seriously!
Selamat Hari Raya! Please forgive my many, many mistakes so far ye tengkiu lapchu.
I’ve written a couple of blogposts about Raya so far, namely:
But I’ve never written a post-Raya spending post-mortem, so that’s what I’m going to do. 2017 was my first Raya where money wasn’t an issue, so I was curious how it compared to previous Raya spending experiences. This is what I spent on this year.
Some people love grocery shopping. Some people don’t.
I happen to belong to the first camp. I LOVE grocery shopping. It’s fun to go to the hypermarket and pick between yellow and red onions haha.
When I first started to budget, my initial research was all about how to save money on groceries before I ‘graduated’ to other topics.
There are lots of ways to save money on groceries in Malaysia. In this guide, I will share what I know. I hope you’ll find it useful for your next shopping trip. I divided this article into helpful shopping tools to have and things to do before, during and after the trip.
I earned RM8743.22. Less than my target of RM10k, but it’s been a good month. Minus expenses for the month (RM3525.17), that’s still RM5k nett income. All of the income came from my writing services.
This is my first sponsored post! I’ll be promoting cards from two banks at the end of this article but all opinion and cashback hack ideas here are my own.
Can I just say that I am actually a big fan of credit cards? I use them anyway and they have saved me a lot of money over the years, especially combined with other cashback hacks. During my recent Krabi trip (which costs me about RM900), I gave example how I used a credit card to make some payments, and got RM50 + RM66 in total cashback. That made the vacation so much sweeter 🙂
