Simple Budget, Simple Life

It was a sudden awakening - I've already worked for more than 5 years. But what have I achieved? I stepped into the rat race as a noob (nobody uses this word now, I admit I'm old), being tekan by unhelpful "seniors" who thankfully left after 1+ year of torture and earning lesser than my peers, to slowly building up my confidence, emerging stronger and being more courageous to say "No", proving myself along the way and getting rewarded with better bonuses and increments. I know I'm working just for the money (and the medical benefits that comes with it). If I look at the money, so far, I should be doing it right in my career. I've decent bonuses and decent increments. I'm in a general profession, but I'm doing pretty ok. So what has my 5 years of work got me? Money.  Through employment, coupled with my thrifty habits, I managed to hit  $100k savings at 25 years old . And it took me another 2-3 years to get another  $100k at 28 . ...

1.5 years ago, I signed up for the FWD 2.02% "savings" plan  and parked $15k. I've always been in search for low risk decent yield alternatives on top of my savings account which I've shared in my tips on how I save >$150k before 28 . While browsing the net, I came across Etiqa's latest whole life insurance savings plan which offers guaranteed 2.02% p.a for the first 3 years. The minimum savings premium is at $5k. So, I thought why not? Since this $5k is something that I do not need atm, it's better for me to park the money here vs keeping it in my CIMB fastsaver earning just 1%. Furthermore, you are able to withdraw money after 90 days - just take note that a service fee is charged if your average daily balance falls below $5k.  I've just applied for the plan and parked $5k. I may be withdrawing this 3 years later and am expected to cash out $325 more interest. The whole process took me less than 10 minutes. Take note that pa...

What luck. My ibanking tokens went dead one after another. OCBC Token First was my OCBC token. It said "low battery", but I ignored it. And when I finally need to use it, it was dead. Granted that I could use SMS OTP, I had to make a big transfer to other banks and it was over the withdrawal limits. And to do that, I needed the ibanking token. And serve me right for not activating the onetoken. In the end, I had to call in to OCBC call centre for a replacement. 7 working days, they said. What a long wait. In the midst of it, I needed to make my interbank transfers. I even went down to OCBC bank and explored a stupid manual way i.e to withdraw cash and deposit into the other bank. But the moment they told me they ran out of big notes, I got scared. While waiting for the token to arrive, I figured I could actually do transfers in smaller amounts, but had to bear with a daily cap. Sigh. And, one week later, my OCBC token arrived. How efficient. DBS token ...

I used to track my daily expenses daily. With every purchases, I'd keyed into google sheets. But as time goes, I got lazy. I figured there's no need for me to track it daily given that I'm disciplined with my outflows. In any case, I've never budgeted how much I should spend on food, transport, shopping etc. Hence, the daily expenses tracking actually don't serve much purpose. However, one thing that I continued to do, is to track my monthly assets/net worth. And they are broadly categorised as follow: Cash Savings FD Stocks CPF It feels good to see your money grow in the different pots and pinpoint which has the biggest growth. So here's presenting my annual net-worth growth since 2015: I'm not confident that I'll hit $400k in the next few months given that I'd be wiping out almost all my CPF for housing soon. Reno cost a bomb and furnitures and appliances will wipe out a chunk of my savings. My net worth will likely drop below...