Let's do our math

Hubby and I are very obsessed with our financial planning. It’s started when we first get married where we have this sort of simple balance sheet. We put all of our salary/claims/allowances at one side and what need to be paid/save at the other side. We then get the balance that we usually will keep on top of the additional savings that we have. We purchase insurance for ourselves, education insurance plan for the kids, we put some amount in ASB, hubby has been investing towards his company share, I have been investing via unit trust and we also bought a few assets.

The strategy actually does make wonders. Hubby for instance, has a few loans when I am married to him. The major one was his study loan and that has been settled within few years as he is persistently paying the debt every month. They are one other debt, which was not supposed to be bear by him. This is where when in his Uni time he registers the phone under his name. And some bugger has used up the phone up to 5k. End up that he need to bear the cost. He can choose not to pay, but we feel that we need to clear all debts. It will affect us sooner or later….and I personally believe God will bless us with more prosperity if we clear our debt. So he’s been paying faithfully 50 bucks each month and recently he has increased to 100 for each month. They are left for a thousand or so to be settled soon.

Back on the spreadsheet, we have projected on how much the fuel and tolls cost for work travel also weekend outing. We calculate how much do we need to spend for lunches (range), groceries and misc. Those we categorized it under transportation and monthly expenses. When we projected basically we are trying to meet the target. With that, it makes me and hubby carefully plan where we eat and what we spend on. That has reduced tremendously on unnecessary spending. Imagine the impulse to eat at fancy restaurant, drink at starbucks or you know especially for ME, to buy all those shoes, handbags, cute little cloths for the kids, toys and many more. The list could be endless. So how do we manage our lust towards the material and the needs to save for our rainy day?

The spreadsheet basically has become our best guideline on how is our current life situation. For the first few years when we earn peanuts and trying to stabilize, life has been very difficult. I mean base on the calculation, we definitely couldn’t do the little luxury. Remember how I blog about all the difficulties that we had for our first few years.
The anniversary, birthday, we do not celebrate in lush. My kid’s wear if it’s branded it must be a present from someone ;). We go through it, not that we don’t afford to buy or just splurge, we think that saving and investing is more important.

As we growth through our career, we actually increase a little bit of our monthly expense. But of course we increase the savings too. I note that we work hard and we should get the rewards. We do reward ourselves, when we think we are worth to be rewarded. But we don’t over do it.

I just meet my unit trust agent. Doing some calculation on how much saving we need to have for our retirement. Factoring the inflation and all, 5k per mon is where I can just live. 5k is not a lot ya...look at our current goods price, what it will be for the next 20 years? 10k per mon if I want to live comfortably. And factoring that the life span will be longer due to the better finding on our medical, imagine we live until 75 years old. Let’s do the math.

Retire at 55 and we live until 75 (example). 20 years to live.

10k * 12 month * 20 years to live after retirement = 24000000

Can you count how many zeros behind the 24? It’s 2.4 million ok!. Can we achieve that? You do your own math ;).

ps: email me if you want to see how our monthly budget spreadsheet looks like