Summary of My Year End Financial Performance of 2018
The 2018 has been a mixed up in finance and in feelings as well in memories (don’t count bad memories). As 2018 has ended and we have a new start up for 2019, it’s time to begin organizing my budgeting for the year 2019 and might be useful to some of you too.
This budgeting journal I’ve created, has been used over the 5 years and I have been monitoring my financial performance mostly on income and expenses using this method and I find it quite interesting to know where the money goes and what I’ve spend over the years.
When I started the Budgeting journal for myself, I find it very hard to keep on track and monitor the expenses. To simplify it, I started with the source of income – where it come from and total it up. Then I create the next row for fixed expenses such as loans, home loan, car loan, personal loan if any, insurance, and others. Then the next sections will be the unfixed expenses such as utilities, bills, and others. And not to forget the charity section for zakat, sadaqah and others related. This one is interesting because you will get tax redemption for zakat, sadaqah unlimited or at least you pay zakat or sadaqah equivalent to your tax for example: tax you pay yearly is ten thousand, you should contribute to zakat or sadaqah more than ten thousand. The last section will be miscellaneous, emergencies and daily expenses.
Once you’ve set up you own budgeting journal, stick to it. You may sometimes forget to key in and most of the time very lazy to keep on track with the expenses especially daily expenses. That is why, most of the time, I pre-set the amount for fix expenses first, then I know how much money left in my wallet. If the result occurs to negative balance, then you should know which one to be eliminated in the expenses section. The key word is PRIORITIZE.
The most difficult part is tracking the daily expenses. However, to make it easier, I compartmentalized the expenses into weekly expenses. For example: RM100 a week and depends on your needs and necessity. So, for 4 weeks, you put aside RM400 for your daily expenses. If I still have money left from the daily expenses, it will go into travel account besides the money that I save for travel. That’s how I save money to travel.
Creating the budgeting journal for the whole year is actually fun. Once you get used to it, you can actually become a good budget planner. It does not matter how low or high your salaries receive every month. The art of financial planning is knowing your ability and limit to earn and spend. The priorities…differs for individuals. I cannot jump into conclusion that everyone has the same needs and priorities. So, if you plan to have a budgeting journal, know your abilities to earn and know your limits to spend. If you have too much money to spend, then spend. If you have less money to spend, then set your priorities. Don’t over limit and you end up having a lot of debts.
We might not know what happen in the future as we can’t see the future. But we can plan for our better future. We make the best decisions and plan for a better future for us, our children and might be to others. We might even wondering, why even bother if everything we plan is a huge unknown in the future? The answer is simple = without building a plan, the simplest problems can hurt our financial success. We might be able to deal with problems occur from time to time, but with a proper financial planning it can help us to detours and side trips whenever it come.
Money will always come and go
“The happiest person might not be the richest in this world, but those who have no bad debts and be able to sleep peacefully at night.”
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