Personal Finance

This is a true story of my double income family in managing our personal finance. My beloved wife is a government servant while i was working as a private sector employee for the past five years back until became a student again now. So, our recent family financial now are 80% coming from my very considerate wife and 20% from my little allowance as a research assistance. But thanks to god that we are consider to put the salary together in very understanding situation. For now , we are just two without having any child yet. But we are already allocate a little from the salary for the sake of our future child.

In order to manage the family financial, we are creating a budget and a list of expenses that may not sound like the most exciting thing in the world to do, but it is vital in keeping our financial house in order. We gather every financial statement includes bank statements, recent utility bills including car-loan payment and any information regarding our monthly expenses. We write down a list of all the expected expenses we plan on incurring over the course of a month. This includes a mortgage payment, car payments, auto insurance, groceries, utilities, entertainment, dry cleaning, retirement or college savings and essentially everything we spend money on. We break expenses into two categories: fixed and variable. Fixed expenses are those that stay relatively the same each month and are required parts of our way of living. They included expenses such as our mortgage or rent, car payments, internet service, credit card payments and so on. Variable expenses are the type that will change from month to month and include items such as groceries, gasoline, entertainment, eating out and gifts, to name a few.We are lucky to have our home without any repayment back to bank as it is a gift from our lovely parent. We record all this total income and expenses in our `family monthly budget log book`.Even though creating a budget is sound good in making our home financial in order , sometime the problem did come when our end result shows more expenses than our income. This is always happen in our variable expenses which sometimes we need emergency money for cars repair cost or massive shopping using the credit cards.

The usage of credit card are not very recommended but sometimes we just need it for any payment when booking the hotel or flight as well. For us, we do have the credit cards actually two cards from maybank finance. We create our rule in using those credit cards which we do shopping only at the range that we possible do the one-off payment at the end of that month without affect the monthly saving amount to our `Tabung Haji` accounts. As told before, we do not have a mortgage for our home but still continually paying car-loan from last year for one of our cars for another four years to come. That takes RM500 as the minimum every month. Thanks to god because we are affordable to buy one of our cars and the motorcycle by cash.