Saving Tips - Introduction

Spending habit – Credit Card

I have seen a lot of saving method, such as only withdrawing only a fixed amount for spending or place a portion of your salary to one saving account. But I feel those method don’t really work for me. I always have the problem of overspending and drawing money from the bank every week. On top of that, I still used credit card to pay for bills and spending. Thus every month a big part of my salary is being used to repay the credit card bills. So the first step to my saving campaign is to reduce the usage of the credit card. Now I only used credit card to pay for my bills, such as mobile phone bills, internet bills, etc…… I have locked up all my credit card except for one credit card which I will used to pay the bills.

Spending habit – Transportation

I have the habit of taking taxi when going to work and during weekend. And you will know that taxi fares are quite expensive when compared with other public transportation such as Bus/MRT. For example, to take taxi from my home to my working place it cost me around S$25. I normally take 2 to 3 times taxi to work every week, thus I will spend almost around S$200 to S$300 minimum every month on taxi. This easily worked out to be S$2.4k to S3.6k a year. That is almost a month’s salary spend on taxi which can be totally avoided. I have not been taking taxi for the past few months (unless can be reimburse by the company) and it is really not a difficult thing to achieve. You just have to wake up on time and take note of the approx. arrival time of the Buses/MRT that you are taking. You can use the IRIS service to check the approx. arrival time of the next bus in the bus stop that you are in. I believe this will help as normally you will get impatient when you don’t see your bus coming and when a taxi comes, you will more likely to take that taxi.

Spending habit – Food

The price of food in Singapore is still reasonable. If you can get a meal outside in the coffee shop for around $2 to $5 depending on what you eat. I used to like to eat in restaurant. For a normal restaurant in Singapore, it will cost around $20/- for a meal for each person. Take for example if you go to eat in restaurant twice a week with your family (assuming one person). A meal will cost around S$50 including tax. That will work out to be S$400 a month. For a year, it will cost you around S$4.8k.

As you can see, by simply changing the way I spend on transportation and food, I will be able to save almost S$7k to S$8k a year. Imagine what you can do with that money.

Also by spending less means that we are actually paying less tax to the government as we will spend less in GST which is currently 7%.