I love reading money diaries. Some of my favourites are Refinery 29’s Money Diaries, and I Pick Up Pennies’, Suraya’s and Fununemployed’s monthly financial updates. I also enjoy reading Tread Lightly, Retire Early’s Friday’s Frugal Five, where she keeps a personal log of how she’s living her frugal, environmental friendly life. It’s the journalling style of blogging that I miss so much, so I look forward to her notes from her life every week.
I love reading about how people spend money. (Don’t we all? No? Just me?) However, keeping a money diary is a challenge for me. For one, I am one of those people who hate tracking anything, so I don’t have detailed charts of my expenses, investments, net worth etc.
Second, the thought of sharing my salary and income gives me hives. I admire how Suraya is so darn open with her finances, but I don’t think I’d be able to achieve that level of openness.
However, this year, I’d like to change that and start a diary because I realise there’s value in collecting data, despite what my data-, graph-adverse self feels and I think it’s great idea to track my expenses and share it here to keep myself accountable. I also think that I don’t have to be such a perfectionist about it. Who says I need to have fancy charts and perfectly record every sen I spend? I’m not running a data collection agency here. The idea is to reflect on my personal finance habits on a regular basis, and any bit of data can help.
So, on that note, I’d like to kick off my monthly Money Diaries series by sharing what I did with my money in 2020. Apologies as this is a rough estimation of what I spent on/saved on in 2020, so no fancy charts and graphs, people!
Savings and investments
Auto pilot.
That was how I would describe the way I saved money in 2020. I had a big goal to save a year’s worth of living expenses and that’s all I focused on last year.
I generally live a relatively frugal life, saving about 40% to 50% of my salary. Dutifully, every month, I’ll park that amount in a high-interest savings account.
However, when it comes to investing my money, I am paralysed. There were so many options out there and they all seemed intimidating. So (cough) I only invested when I remembered to. Which isn’t often.
I felt an urgent need to bulk up my emergency fund because, well, call it a weird sixth sense. Although I theoretically already have about a year’s worth at the start of 2020, I didn’t want to touch that money. That was my “in case the sky falls down and I’m close to living under a bridge” fund and I wanted to save an “in case I lose all my income and had to live 100% off my savings” fund.
In 2019, I felt that time was nigh, so it’ll do well to have a year’s worth of living expenses. The feeling was so strong that in 2019 that I rebalanced my portfolio and increased my cash reserves and paid off my car loan. (I’m not psychic – it’s just that my career transition out of journalism has been rocky to say the least and I just feel more secure with additional funds to weather the storm.)
In March, I decided to venture out on my own to start my own business.
And … two weeks later lockdown was imposed on Malaysia. Oops, not the best timing, but I had the fortune of having at least a year’s worth of cash reserves.
From March to July, I focused on preserving cash flow. I stopped saving and investing because not much was coming in. Fortunately, I didn’t have to dig too deeply into my savings as I had enough freelance copywriting work to pay the bills. But it was an uncomfortable feeling to just have enough and not know when the cash flow will stop.
In August, I returned to full time work, and my savings rate has returned to the 40-50% of before.
I invested a whole heap of money in December to make up for lost time — RM3000 on my usual PRS fund, and RM2000 for my usual unit trust. I also threw in about RM1000 in StashAway.
But I still ended 2020 with too much cash uninvested and feeling clueless and paralysed about what to do about it. I hope this year I’ll get over my paralysis and invest in ETFs like I’ve always wanted to.
Daily living expenses
1. Before COVID-19 hit
January to February, I was working a full time job where I had to travel to an office via public transport and eat meals in a mall. My monthly expenses was about RM3370 then. When MCO hit and I had to work from home, I realised how expensive the 9 to 5 lifestyle was. I think I spent more money “soothing” myself via expensive lunches and dinners, gym memberships and through miscellaneous expenses such as hotel staycations.
Fixed expenses
- Insurance RM475
- Apartment management fee RM248.57
- Phone RM41
Total fixed expenses: RM764.57
Variable expenses
- Transportation (LRT) RM100 pass + RM160 ktm
- Transportation (fuel and parking) RM100 + RM50
- Food RM1000 (I eat out a lot)
- Entertainment 200
- Groceries 300
Total variable expenses: RM1,910
Misc expenses
- Scribd RM39
- Netflix RM55
- Misc RM500
- Gym 200
Total Misc Expenses: RM694
TOTAL MONTHLY EXPENDITURE: RM3568.57 (let’s round it up to 3570).
2. During MCO (lockdown) and my freelancing days
March to July. I cut my expenses to the bare bone, cutting out Netflix and Scribd subscriptions, because I no longer had a fixed income. (No worries, I still had plenty of entertainment – I had a massive pile of unread books and shared a Netflix account with my dad.) Also, it helped that I didn’t have to travel daily to work and eat meals at an expensive mall! I was also really, really grateful my gym suspended monthly payments until the strict lockdowns were lifted. My condo also suspended payments for two months in May and June. Thank you, condo management!
On March and April, I was serving out my notice so I still had income. I made sure to save most of it. I lived on that in the following months and supplemented it with freelance and rental income.
The lean days of the MCO taught me that I could live on an emergency budget and do it pretty happily too. In fact, it became a fun challenge to see how to “frugal” some of my expenses.
One of my expensive vices is bubble tea. During the lean months I would buy bubble tea from Tea live only on Thursday afternoons because I get a special member’s discount which allowed me to buy two bubble tea drinks at a steep discounted rate! Then, I learned how to make my own boba pearls. It took forever to do it but it sure slashed my bubble tea expenses!
I also made steamed buns, another favourite vice – when I realised that each steamed bun cost only RM.020 to make, I couldn’t make them enough.
I knew I had it so much better than so many other people during this period. Although I was always worried about income, I still had some passive income (although my rental income was slashed by 70%). And there was freelance work. Some months they were just enough. Some months I had to dip into my savings.
Still, it was also an idyllic period where I rested and watched a lot of K-dramas, worked on my novels, indulged in long walks in the evenings and learned to make many things with my hands.
And I could only do this because over 10 years ago I had this seemingly mad ambition to get rid of all my debts, including the house loan. I worked my ass off to do it, and finally achieved 100% debt-free status in 2019 when I paid off my car. I had an emergency fund cushion to fall back on.
I’m also incredibly lucky to have parents who are frugal living, debt-free lovers like me. They paid off all their loans before they retired, and are now self-sustaining with their pensions and their simple, frugal lifestyle. So, I didn’t have to support them as much as many people out there. Also, they were very willing to help me lower my expenses by, well, feeding me silly.
So debt-free living – it’s real, and it’s incredible during times of crisis like this. I’m glad I took the hard road to do this.
Fixed expenses
- Insurance RM475
- Apartment management fee RM248.57
- Phone RM41
Total fixed expenses: RM764.57
Variable expenses
- Fuel 20 (i barely travelled for obvious reasons!)
- Eating out RM300
- Groceries RM300
- Misc RM100
TOTAL MONTHLY EXPENSES RM1484.57
3. Remote working full time
August to December. The budget is a more generous version of the MCO budget.
I got rid of my gym membership. That thing was a tragedy. I took a 1-year contract around Nov 2019 and only got to enjoy it for a few months before MCO hit. Then, once MCO lifted I had to pay the fees eventhough I didn’t use the gym – I didn’t feel it was safe – with elderly parents, I have to take precautions. Getting out of that contract was a nightmare, with many accounting mistake and fees along the way. Nope, not going to join a commercial chain gym ever again.
I fattened mostly my eating out expense. Now, I’m a foodie, and unlike many frugalistas out there, I happily indulge in it and consider it a part of my mental healthcare. I don’t feel bad at all for spending more on eating out. All in all, my monthly expenses, during this period was about 2074.57.
Fixed expenses
- Insurance 475
- Apartment management fee 248.57
- Phone 41
Total fixed expenses: RM764.57
Variable expenses
- Fuel 50 (I travelled a little more during the RMCO)
- Eating out RM700
- Groceries RM300
- Fun stuff (including Scribd subscription and book rental from Lovely Ever After books) RM100
- Gym fees RM160 (until November 2020, when the membership ended)
Total variable expenses: RM1310
TOTAL EXPENSES: RM2074.57
My Big Ticket Expenses – gadgets, courses, oh my!
Thank you, PENJANA. If not for you, I would have refrained from indulging myself at the end of the year. As you can see, I’m not a big spender of things. Except for bubble tea. Oh well, that’s another story.
Confession: I avoided all things Budget 2020 because I was depressed about it. I felt that it was a bad budget and when I’m depressed about the state of the country, I avoid reading news about it. And I’m really good at avoiding.
Fortunately a friend told me about it at the nick of time. So that’s how I only came to know about the PENJANA benefits in December, a month away from being able to claim for it! (Facepalms)
For non-Malaysian readers, PENJANA is the Malaysian government’s COVID-19 economic stimulus package to help businesses and individuals. It contains many tax-related measures, but I primarily claimed on these:
Domestic travel expenses – RM1100
RM1,000 tax exemption on domestic travelling expenses (accommodation and entrance fees to tourist attractions)
Okay I loved that one of my favourite things to do – staying in hotels – is now a claimable tax expense. I used this by staying in a couple of hotels, including the fancy KLoe hotel. I maxed it out and then some.
Tablet – RM1,800
RM2,500 tax exemption on smartphones, notebooks and tablets
My iPad 2 has been stumbling to a slow death for a long while. Although there’s still some life in that old girl (a hand me down from Dad), I decided that it was a good time to buy a Samsung Tab Lite s6 since I could claim for it. I’ve been really pleased with it because not only can I use it as a way to cut down on printing expenses thanks to the handy stylus which allows me to annotate PDF documents and write on digital documents, it can be used as a replacement laptop. During the RMCO days when we could dine in at cafes, I would take the tablet there to blog or read online blogs or magazines.
Other expensive things I bought but which I can’t darn well claim as tax relief:
Online Course (Grow and Convert) – RM2820
This was a tough decision to make, as I wasn’t sure how beneficial the course was and I was buying it during the peak of the COVID-19 economic uncertainty period when I wasn’t sure about my financial stability. But I’m happy to say that it is as it helps me in my current work as a content strategist. Also, it’s not just a static web video course but gives me access to a community of content marketers and the lecturers – for life!
So there you have it – my financial journey in 2020. I hope you had some fun reading it. It felt cathartic writing it, realising that I didn’t do too bad that year, despite my paralysis over investing. I’m looking forward to writing my monthly Money diary. Do keep an eye out for it! 🙂
Elizabeth Tai 