Simple Budget, Simple Life

Each day passing is one step towards old age. Unknowingly, we are in mid 2019. Top-up to CPF SA Anyway, with my bonuses in, I decided to park $7k into my CPF SA for tax relief purposes. I've always been saying that I should do the $7k voluntary top-up at start of the year to gain extra interest, but have never done so hahaha Got my hubby to do the same as well...not without some nagging and me taking control of the transfer  🤦‍♀️ Hubby wasn't super keen as he preferred to keep the cash to pay off our housing loan ASAP. His thoughts on our housing loan For context, our balance to pay is at $500k+ 🙃We are paying equal amounts for the home. Wipe out our CPF, leaving $20k in OA Pay $100k cash upfront (or even more if we can afford) - he feels our investments does not beat 2.6% interest charged by HDB for loan. This is true given majority of our money in savings accounts, SSBs, FDs which gives at best 2% interest? For the remaining amount, to get a 25 years loan ...

As usual, good things don't last. First was BOC Family card , now it seems like the temporary-attractive CIMB cards are going the same way too... Before Both CIMB Visa and Platinum requires min $600 spend and gives 10% rebate ($50 cashback per category, up to $100 cashback) on: Visa Signature Dining Online spend Grocery Platinum Travel Health, Beauty & Wellness Transport & Petrol W.e.f 5 Jun 2019 Both CIMB Visa and Platinum requires min $800 spend and gives 10% rebate ( $20 cashback per category, up to $100 cashback) on: Visa Signature Dining (now reflected under Platinum) Online spend   shopping ("This excludes all other online websites, not limited to movies, food & beverage, travel, airline, government, brokerages/securities, insurance, tuition and online gambling websites")... wth ? Grocery Beauty & Wellness (new) Pets Shops and Veterinary Services (not applicable to me) Cruise Platinum Travel (only in for...

I've previously shared my purchase of the ELASTIQ plan here  where I purchased the minimum amount at $5,000. Happy to provide some updates on the plan and the ease of tracking my interest online! Via the tiqconnect web, I was able to see a clean, user-friendly and straightforward webpage showing the interest credited to me on the first month, just like an ibanking page :P I'm considering topping up more money for them to grow at 2.02% interest. Furthermore, it is stated that "Top-up or withdraw from your account without penalty or interest claw back 90 calendar days after policy issue date" This can probably act as another savings account for me to grow my cash. Will definitely keep this plan for the first 3 years! As mentioned previously, I only took 10 mins to sign up for the plan. If you are interested, key in R104346 under referral code and you'll get Etiqa eWallet credits worth 0.5% of policy’s premium value ($25 credits for a $5,000 plan...

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...