Private Financial Crisis

“How much money did you use last month?” A roommate asked me.

“$99.5.”I checked my notebook of the account and gave her the exact number.

“How come did you use only $99.5 ! That’s amazing!” She looked at me surprised.” I spent nearly $250…….”

“I did remember you bought some clothes.”

“oh.. but that T-shirt only cost me $40…where did I spend the rest? I can’t remember….”

That night, my roommate put all her effort into retracing where her money was spent, but in vain, she couldn’t pick up any clue

Recently, I have found that most of the students around me encounter private financial crisis. Since we have learned something about “Stress” this week, private Financial Crisis ranks Top One among the all the stressors that causes our anxiety. A raise in our pocket money every month is heated debated these days. But as we all know, it seems impossible to request MOE to give us more pocket money. So how to manage your money is very important.

I am not an expert in managing money. But I still want to share some of my experience about managing money. Here are some tips:

1, Pay in cash instead of credit card.
One of my roommates always pays in credit card. Because of that, she nearly doesn’t know how much money she spends and where she spends all her money. Indeed, paying in credit card is very convenient and fast. But It also makes us feel lost at sea when we want to know more details about our spending. My suggestion is that use cash instead of credit card. So next time, when you want to buy something expensive, if you pay in cash, you may think 3 times before you buy it. After all, that is a large amount of money.

2, Keep accounts every day.
I didn’t fall into the habit of keeping accounts until I came to Singapore. Naturally, I didn’t find out of advantages about it before. “Boring” and “Troublesome” were my understanding of keeping accounts. But when I started to build up my notebook of the accounts, the advantages floated up. What I want to do is not sharing the advantages but telling about the method I use for keeping accounts.
Date :3 Feb 2009
Cash( record of the remaining money in your purse)
$77
$81.8(the previous record)-1.8(lunch)+2(borrow)-5(lend)=77.0
Account Balance(the money in your POSB card)
$898.8

Lend(how much you lend to others)
-$2(to Linda)

Borrow(how much you borrow from others)
+$(from Peter)

After you finish your account, you might as well check the cash in your purse whether the record is correct.
At the end of every month, you just need to use the equation below to get the total of your spending this month:
(Cash1+Account Balance1)-(Cash2+Account Balance2)=result
(“Cash1+Account Balance1” represents the money you have at the beginning of the month;
“Cash2+Account +Balance2”represents the remaining money at the end of the month;
Why do I use the data from “Account Balance”?
Because you may withdraw money from your card so you must use the data of the account balance which increases the “cash “.)

Above is what I want to share with you. Hope you could get something from my blog. It is really very useful. Form a habit needs courage and patience. In addition, you have to devote time. To keep accounts, 1 minute everyday is enough. Sometimes we can use special software to help us. From my point of view, it is not the method you use that counts but the awareness.