Tonight, I went to Brewerkz where I spent $36 on a burger and an orange juice. Then I went to Timbre and had a $16 Pina Colada. After that I took a cab home from Clarke Quay for $18. So that's a total of $70 for a night. That would be an average night, if I don't count the tens of dollars of unclaimed I.O.U.s.
In just the first week of school, I've gone out 3 times. So I realized it's time to start keeping track of my expenses, the way I used to when I was in primary school. Back then, I jotted down the price of every single item I bought in the school canteen in my Maybank Savers booklet and however much of my pocket money I saved, Mom would double it to put into our piggy banks. Back then 'a lot of money' looked like 1 ringgit or 1 ringgit 50 sen.
In order to lead the comfortable life I want, every month I would have to spend an average of:
$50 x 30 days on meals: $1500
Car expenses: $700
Phone bill: $150
$200 x 4 days on clothes shopping: $800
Miscellaneous: $1000
Total: $4150
That would just be bare minimum expenditure to lead a 'comfortable' life. If I want to be relatively free of monetary concerns, just spending as I please, I'm going to need to earn way way more. This is without even considering vacations, luxury items, a house and accident/medical fees yet.
This is such a sobering realization. Like a splash of cold water. :/
3 comments:
In fact, you severely underestimated your car expenses. For an average car (non Audi), it should look like this. All in S$ per month average:
Car loan: 500
Petrol (daily car use): 300 to 500
Car parking: 100 to 150
Erp: 50 to 100
Road tax: 70
Car insurance: 200
Car servicing: 100
Misc (parking fines by fatimah, etc.): 50
So all in all you have to spend between S$1370 to S$1670 a month.
And thanks to the crazily high COE prices now, you might have to pay twice the amount for the car loan. An Audi A4 costs maybe between S$220k to S$250k right now. I think I just saw a msian advert promoting VW polo at just RM 104k. That's not even enough to buy the piece of paper to own a car here......
And you haven added in spending on your house mortgage. A S$ 1 million condo would set you back by at least S$2.2k a month.....
Thanks for the budgeting. Guess it's the MRT for me and I'm never going to move out.
sweetie, i've done the math for myself before, and i empathise.
you know i love eating out, but surely, having expensive meals every day isn't part of the plan?
xx
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