- Income tax - you need to file by 15 April of each year and pay sometime in May/June/July of the same year
- Property tax - you need to pay by 31 Jan and IRAS has this annoying habit of increasing your annual value (goes up but hardly ever comes down)
- Club/Membership subscriptions in professional bodies
[caption id="attachment_1212" align="alignright" width="170" caption="Photo by Gunnar Wrobel"][/caption]
I was reading SgMusicwhiz’s blog post “Creating a Personal Budget” and was inspired to write a related post discussing how you can live within your means if you track your expenses and plan ahead. You can read his post for the basic framework on how you can plan your personal budget.
Record your past and learn to anticipate the future
One of the things I got from reading “Your Money or Your Life” by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin is to start tracking my daily expenses, earned income as well as passive income from investments. This tracking of cash flows allowed me to see actually how much I was really saving versus what I “thought” I was saving.
It also prompted me to be more aware of expenses that hit at various times of the year and to be in a better position to anticipate my cash flows.
What I realised from tracking my expenses is that we tend to under-budget for once a year payments. Some of these include: