Family Budgeting

2020 - Turtle Monthly Family Budgeting (Cash and CPF)

Family profile: 3 adults and 2 children.

Total: $8,119.39

This figure is probably higher than my actual expense as non-fixed items like travel can varies year on year, I will just budget to the maximum worst case scenario on overseas travel.

Every year, I will do up the projected budget for the upcoming new year based on the expenses we incurred as a family of four plus a foreign domestic helper.

Looking at the numbers, they give me a very good estimates of our overall family expenses as I based on the actual expenses that we managed to capture last year to come out with the budgeting.

Breakdowns on each category

Personal includes mobile phone subscription, weekday lunches, weekend spending, haircuts and shopping. Basically anything we spent on our self instead of the family.

Insurance includes insurances our personal (excluding children) hospitalization policies, term/whole life policies, home protection, personal accident, income protection, critical illness (including early CI) and dependent protection scheme (DPS).

Parents includes the allowance that we provide for them.

Utilities and tax includes our electricity, water and property tax bills.

Car Ownership includes cost such as season/casual parking, insurance, road tax, petrol and regular maintenance of the vehicle mechanical parts.

Children includes the cost of our two children such as school fees, presents/birthday celebration, insurance, enrichment classes and medicals.

Non-Fixed includes overseas travel, eating out, family outing (for example, annual zoo membership), festive celebration (Chinese New Year, Christmas etc), gifts, groceries, necessities, diapers/milk powder and fengshui consultation.

Foreign Domestic Helper includes their salary, gifts, insurance, annual bonus, home leave, levy and medical check up.

Having a budget gives you a piece of mind that you are not overspending and knew exactly where and what you are spending on as part of achieving financial freedom.

A good way to do your upcoming year budgeting would be looking back at the past year expenses and do an average and be true to yourself. But you do not need to over budget although I tend to over budget instead of under budget as I tend to be more conservative. The key work is to be as pragmatic and be as close to reality as possible.

If you do not know know how much you are spending, there is a high risk of overspending.