Last year I spent $18,500 for the whole year. This year, I hope the amount will be lower than that. It’s not yet my target though.
My target monthly budget, probably achievable in 2021, is as follows:
- $200 – insurance without cash value
- $50 – household
- $30 – mobile subscription
- $75 – transport
Total $355/mth would be unavoidable.
Then the rest can be avoided, if I want to. These would be:
- $250 – holidays
- $200 – investments
- $25 – IT subscriptions
- $20 – pets
- $15 – entertainment
Total $510/mth would be variable. If it came down to it, I could live without these.
Entertainment can actually be shaved to zero, but once a month I like to enjoy a movie in the theatre. All my other entertainment is already free.
Pets will depend on how good my cat is, or how injured or sick he gets. Here’s hoping for good health!
IT subscriptions. I’ve shaved all these down except for Dropbox, which I use as external storage and backup. I used to use JustCloud for backup, but now Dropbox has that option as well, for an increased price. But it’s still better than paying for two cloud-based services.
Travel. $250/mth for holidays is actually quite high. When I was working, I used to spend $125/mth to $150/mth on an annual holiday. But now that I’ve stopped working and found out that actually taking holidays can be very cheap, I now travel almost every other month. It’s much more worth it now. Actually, one of the things I’m worried about is that I may not actually spend 183 days in Singapore each year. Would that affect my residency? Hmmm….
Investments. The $200/mth I have goes towards endowment plans. I’ve only got a few more years before they mature, so I might as well keep them up. I don’t actually count them as expenses, because the cash potentially comes back to me. So if you exclude that, then my variable expenses becomes $310/mth.
That brings my total expenses (money that I’m not getting back) to $665/mth, or about $8,000/year. That’s still higher than Rob Greenfield’s $5000/year. Hmmm…
Daniel Tay 