As a just-turned-25-year-old, they say that this is the age in which your frontal lobe fully develops, and I truly believe it. It's been an incredible but challenging year of growing up, and that includes taking charge of my personal financial situation. Can't continue to depend on my parents for lunch money.
As working adults earning their own income, I believe it's not just our responsibility to ensure that we have enough savings for rainy days, but to also diversity investments and truly understand the state of finances, whether we have enough for long-term, large purchases that we will spend many years of our youth paying off.
When put in this angle, it really feels like we should be absolutely kiasu in the way we earn, spend and save - but the real question is, how kiasu should we be that we can ensure a good savings standing while not being constantly worn down by money pressures?
On my end, I feel that I am extremely kiasu with my finances. I still keep track of each individual income and expense, which is updated weekly and consolidated during the month-end, where I can see how much I've saved in the month. This translates to an expense-earning & savings-earning ratio, which tells me if I am spending or earning more with my current income.
Individually logging each item, and systematically categorizing each item in a spreadsheet also helped me to understand which aspect and I spending too much on - and in a yearly dashboard view, which items I have the opportunity to invest and generate more income, and which items I should reduce expenses on in both rolling-12 months and YTD. All side income are split out by type and platform to see which I should continue to ramp up and invest in.
At the end of every month, I consolidate the savings I have in my bank account after settling all my credit card bills and other mandatory expenses, as well as my investments to give me my current financial standing. As I have a clear view of how I currently stand financially in the month, I'm able to also build a realistic projection of when I'll hit major financial milestones based on my average monthly savings rate, which tells me by when I should be able to put a down payment for a home, etc.
While it sounds tedious, it's actually quite fun when you have a system set up that just requires you to be disciplined enough to update it. This has helped me boost my savings-earnings ratio to 50%, but none of my other peers track their finances to this level.
So I do wonder, am I being too kiasu in my finances?
C Chai (crystal.chaijeecheng@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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