One of the hardest things to do as an adult is financial planning. As a rite of passage, adults needs to be more responsible when it comes to spending - balance out life activities and spend within means. While some working women are fine with the idea on letting their debts accumulate over time, this will only incur more problems later in life. Here are some smart budgeting tips for the working woman.
The 50-20-30 plan
What to do: Split the monthly income after paying the taxes to 50-20-30. Half of the monthly income goes to essentials (groceries, transport, utilities, etc), the 20 goes to savings and the rest is for miscellaneous things like shopping and fun stuff. This plan helps to limit the unnecessary expenditure that most people do and focus on finances for the future.
Plan a shopping list properly
It is easy to write a shopping list or add a check-list on the smartphone on things to buy. What’s not easy is to still feel like buying them after two or three days. If the things listed are still needed after a couple of days, there’s a high chance that those are necessities rather than just spur-of-the-moment wants.
Don’t browse online shopping apps for too long
Career women are often busy working and balancing life. So for their shopping, they take their phones and tap on either Shopee, Lazada, Zalora and look around. The temptation to buy many things always comes when more time is spent browsing through these shopping apps. An easy way out? Don’t spend too long looking through them.
Save every RM5 bill in your purse
A simple way to save money is to not spend a particular colour of a dollar bill. For Malaysians, there are a lot of colours on the ringgit bill. RM5 bills are green, RM10 bills are red, RM20 are orange, and so on. Since saving RM20 bills is not practical, saving RM5 is slightly better. At the end of a working day, after breaking down all the bigger bills, there’s bound to be at least one RM5 bill in your purse. Put it aside in a separate pouch and do this every day that there’s a RM5 bill left. Doing this for a year can lead to quite a hefty sum of money to add to the savings account.
Look for tips from banks
Banks exist to manage finances. It’s not surprising that they also provide financial services -consultation, strategizing and personal planning. If you're not comfortable talking to bank officers, you could always access your official bank website and find financial plans or access basic precautions for anything under the sun for money. Having banks that provide these fundamental information would make the working woman more reassured to heed their tips.
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