3 Tools to Ace Personal Finance

My passion for personal finance started when I was in NS, as I knew that I would not have any form of allowance in uni, and have to completely rely on myself from that point onwards.

Saving a minimum of 50% of my monthly allowance has been my target ever since I started this journey and that I have managed to stay within my limit without doing any specific budgeting. I am proud to say that I have reached my target of saving 50% monthly and to be frank, the majority of my growth in my net worth actually comes from savings rather than capital appreciation from investment. (as with any young person)

In this article, I want to share with you the tools I use to manage my finances, and hopefully, this may inspire you to equip yourself in your Personal Finance Quest.

Budget and Expense Tracker App

I didn't use any budgeting and expense tracker app before enlisting. the rationale being the fact that I am able to track my spendings at the end of every month anyway.

I started tracking my transactions after enlistment because it allows awareness of your expenditure and thus allows you to make adjustments through the month. (A retrospective review isn't as effective). There are many such apps out there within the market, which includes the Seedly app. (special shoutout to Seedly!) I highly recommend everyone to use an app to keep themselves aware of your expenditure! The key point here is to take ACTION.

StocksCafe

Instead of using a spreadsheet to trace your portfolio performance which may be quite tedious. You can consider StocksCafe, a web portfolio management tool specially developed for Singapore investors.

I mainly use StocksCafe to trace and monitor my portfolio performance. To start tracking my portfolio performance, I only need to insert transactions of stocks from supported exchanges like Singapore Exchange, Hong Kong stock market, NY stock market, and Nasdaq and London stock market among other exchanges. The free version only supports 30 transactions so I recommend you to be a friend of StocksCafe (a paid version) which supports unlimited transactions and other benefits.

After adding all the transactions into your portfolio in StocksCafe, during which you'll import all of your transactions employing a given template, StocksCafe will churn out a report containing Time-Weighted Returns, Monthly Volatility, Max Drawdown, and XIRR.

The one feature that I prefer about StocksCafe is going to be its ability to trace my portfolio performance accurately. With StocksCafe, I don't need to consider what metrics to use for tracking and that I have a report updated daily.

Insurance Calculator

LIA often recommends 10 years of income for your Death/TPD coverage and 5 years of your income for Critical Illness. However, we all know that these are just Rule of Thumbs... How much insurance coverage do we need really?

I have personally created a separate spreadsheet for the aim of calculating my EXACT insurance coverage based on this report here:

Basically, take into account your liabilities based on the following factors:

• Additional expenses: funeral costs and unpaid services

• Personal and housing loans

• Ongoing expenses for dependents: needs of the children, needs of elderly parents, rent and future household expenses, after deduction of the remaining income of the spouse

And take into account the available resources to alleviate yourself financially upon the occurrence of such events:

• Saving: CPF and Other Savings (cash and deposits)

• Insurance coverage: Group and Individual insurance

So far I also enjoy the free calculator provided by: Moneyowl.

I personally feel however that it tends to be on the conservative side and lacks objectivity since you do it yourself. Do feel free to talk to me about the aspects of this calculation!

You can slide into my DMs here.

Or connect with my Linkedin here.

Talk more,

Ngooi