Late Financial Knowledge

Welcome to my first finance blog post. Will share with you my financial journey starting from young. Let’s go!

I consider myself very bad in my personal finance from young because I’m a person who will spend all my money whenever my mum gives me an allowance for a specific period of time. I remembered my mum gave me $5 per day when I was in Primary school. Most of the time, I will spend finish end of the day. I spent mainly on food, which I will spend during recess and the remaining money will spend on food when I am on my way back home.

When I got into Secondary School, I remembered my mum opened a bank account for me to handle my allowance. During that time, my mum asked me whether I want to get my allowance per day, per week, or per month. After thinking about it, I replied per month because I feel rich at the start of every month. HAHAHHA. My mum gave me $300 per month for my allowance during that time. Starting of every month, I will not be at home having dinner for around 2 weeks. But after that, I will always go home for dinner and sometimes even lunch. That's when I spent all my money. During that time, I always tell myself that it is fine because I spent all my money on food where I enjoy myself and not other stuff like toys, playing cards etc… So during my Secondary School days, I got no savings.

When I got into ITE and Polytechnic, my mum starts to give me $500 per month. Anyway, during that time, I was mainly outside, daytime I was either in school or going out with friends and most of the nighttime I will be either having basketball training or playing basketball. Therefore, most of the time I am outside having my meal. And during that time when I turned 18, I started to go drink and party whenever I got money or start of the month :) So, back to square one, I got no savings.

From young till during serving NS, I got less than S$1 000 under my name.

Things slowly changed when I was serving my National Service (NS). One of my good friends who knows me quite well introduced me to read a book, Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. I remembered clearly that he spent some time and talk to me about my personal finance just before I enlist for NS. After talking to him, he lend me the book and I spent some time reading in camp. At first, I was a bit lazy to start to read because I never complete reading a book before. But to my surprise, I totally understand what the book is saying, and I can totally relate to the book where it says the middle class (I consider myself as middle class) always spent money first and save whatever is left, middle class spends mainly on liabilities than assets and middle class does not know how to differentiate between the liabilities and assets class.

The more I read, the more I agreed with the book. From there, I start to read more on finance and investment books. From then, I start to manage my finance properly like stop overspending, lives below my means or budget and ask myself whether its wants or needs. Next, when I was in university, another of my good friends actually share with me that I should start to record my spending and at least know where my money to go. So in 2013, I start to track my spending. Till date, I still cannot find an app to use maybe because I get too used to Excel to track all my spending because I feel that Excel got more freedom to change or input anything I want. Below is my budget list now…

By the way, I edit here and there until I get comfortable with these formats. From the above table, I can easily see my overall spending for the month and that year. Under ‘Personal Daily Expenses’ are those I spent on daily activities mainly food and groceries. Under ‘Monthly Overall View’ are my take-home salary, deduct those monthly fixed items like example, pay myself first (save), amount I give my parents, monthly insurance, phone bill and etc… Under ‘Variable’ will be adding up the daily expenses and transportation. Under ‘Others; Yearly’ will be those events not going to happen often like example during this month of May, there’s Mothers’ Day, I will indicate that in this column.

I feel that I had my financial knowledge quite late as compared to all of my friends.

After reading the first finance book, from someone who does not really care or manage personal finance to someone who does every small little thing just to make sure every cent is well spent and knows where every cent goes. And now planning for retirement and also started investing.

For those who reading this, please do not follow my younger self. Do learn and read more about personal finance and investment as it is important for your future self. Trust me. Will share more about my savings, investments and retirement soon.

Cheers!