Dear readers, for those of you who have been following me for some time, you would have known that I have been practising the habit of recording all my expenditure since National Service days, some decades ago.
Being able to record one’s expenditure will enable one to track one’s spending and this will lead to knowing how much one saves. This will in turn enable one to assess how much more one is to his or her savings goal.
Despite all the savings and money apps these days, I still maintain a simple and humble excel spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet allows me the flexibility to create different categories of expenditures that I will like to track. The spreadsheet also provides me with the freedom to organize the data that will best suit my needs to track my savings and expenditures.
For quite some time now, I have been wondering whether I am overspending on recreation. Simple recreations that are really needed to simply recharge after days and weeks of hectic busy work.
I would find that as one total up one’s spending on recreational, the amount may not be easy to rationalise whether one is overspending. That is why I thought that a simple way will be to simply average out one’s spending over the month to date.
For example, if one has spent $600 on recreation in a year, does that amount to overspending? Well, using my monthly averaging method, the above amount works out to $50 per month or slightly less than $2 a month (or around price of one averagely-price cup of coffee daily). This method may be easier for one to rationalise one’s spending.