Run your house

"Trying to learn to run your own house? Come let me teach you......."

I had a an interview with my parents about what is it like to run my own house and the different house hold expenses that would be expected to be spent. It is as follows


-Housing: There would be a spending of $900 with the most being spent would be mortgage, which for the most part is paid through CPF (Central Provision Fund).

-Insurance: Total insurance cost of the insurances would be $780, the highest among the insurance would be both the Health and Life insurances. Which cost around the same.

-Transportation: On average, the monthly transportation would be around $1,450 with the car's installment costing the most at $800.

-Food: With $450 spent monthly, most meals are taken at home as dinner would normally be cooked. This does not include cost for food bought outside.

-Allowances: In a family of 3, there would be a total of $2.25 thousand spent within the whole family. Do note that this value does not include personal expenditure like buying a watch or a new sofa.

This totals up to be roughly $5.75 thousand on a average month.

Tips & Tricks 

Some advice that I got was that to always save before I spend, to spend within my means as well as differentiate between wants & needs. Personally I am rather interested in some ways that my parents are doing to actively save money.

One example is to always switch the main pluck that connects to television to the electricity. Being curious I asked and inquired more. What I found was that there would be a saving of 10% in electricity bills as my parents have experimented with this idea and are still practicing till today! Reason being that in the day, everybody in the house will out for either school or work, so nobody will be at home to use the television. Not only that, but during the late nights when every one is asleep in the bed, the long hours of nighttime also help contribute to the amount electricity that is being consumed. Now I know why my parents would want me to have the need to constantly turn off and on the switch for the television.

Besides electricity, water is also being saved in the house. "How?" you may ask. Well put quite simply that recently the tap at the sink over in the kitchen has started to leak droplets of water every second or so. Not only is it environmentally negative, but it also cost money. So to solve this problem, what my family did was to take a bucket and placed it in the sink when it is not being used to wash the dishes. But how will it save water and money?" I hear you ask. Let's just say my mother keeps multiple plants just outside of the house. See where I am going? AND, not to mention that you can also save water by using the water accumulated to flush the toilet after urinating!

Conclusion.

If I had a family, I would actually have my wife and I use the application PayLah! by DBS as I personally feel it is a good way to track and record how much/limit our spending as the application allows you to set a limit of the amount of money you can transfer.

Not to mention that PayLah! can act as an virtual wallet. This idea is not totally impossible at all, as the the world is constantly moving, developing and evolving technology. 10 years ago who would have thought of paying for a cup of drink though simply scanning a code with your phone?

As of advises, I would heed the one that my parents gave, which is to always spend/save on the necessities for running the house. In a way, running a home is a big responsibility and it can never be a small feat for anyone. However, now that I reflect I am grateful that the government have such implemented things such as CPF to help Singaporeans to passively save money and manage livelihood expenditures such as housing. In a way it should have been our own responsibilities when it comes to money management.

To sum it all, I think it would be a good challenge for myself when I grow up to try and manage my own house. A good way to start is to always start young. Who knows, maybe one day the government may take away the concept of CPF and we would all be left with own wits and discipline to manage our own money.