Beginning this year, I switched to an Android phone and had to use a new app to record my expenses. The beauty of this new app is that it allows me to enter scheduled expenses ahead of time. Thus, by the first day of the year, I was already down by $5,000 (not counting those variable or unknown monthly expenses such as utilities and taxes). This reminded me of an exercise that I carried out once a while -- to figure out how many months do I have to work to cover all my expenses and financial commitments for the year. For this year, I would have to work for 8.6 months, or more precisely, 8 months and 18 days. Hence, I will have to work until 18 Sep to cover all my expenses and financial commitments for the year. What is the use of this exercise? Well, firstly, ......