Review your first year against a checklist and set your plan for year two.
After a year in a first job, most people have collected more money paperwork than they expected, and none of it shows them where they stand overall. A few documents are finished and current. Others were started and then left, and some were planned but never begun. The year-end review gathers all of these into one place and closes off your first year of work, and it takes about 45 minutes.
You produce three things: a 12-month checklist table covering all nine course areas, a half-page written review, and three money goals for year two with an amount and a date for each. You also compare your savings with your plan, and that comparison counts as one of the four parts of a finished project. Work from your own course documents where you have them and from the sample documents where you don't.
Give the table one row for each course area and keep the rows in a fixed order: offer, payslip, CPF, benefits, budget, parents, loan, insurance, investing. Across the top go three columns: status, what is left, and date for next step.
Every row takes one of three statuses. A row is Done when the thing exists and is current, and an intention you once had doesn't qualify. In progress covers anything started but not complete. Not started means it hasn't been begun, which is sometimes a deliberate choice. Mark each row honestly, then give every row that isn't Done a date for its next step, since an in-progress item without a date tends to stay in progress permanently.
Take Hui Min (an invented example, with invented money figures throughout), who started her first job a year ago. It is now January, and her year has left her with an offer sheet, three months of payslip checks, a benefits map, a budget, a loan schedule and an insurance brief. Her nine rows look like this:
Offer: Done, with her comparison sheet saved. Payslip: In progress. Her monthly check stopped after month four, and she has set February to restart it. CPF: Done. Each quarter she checks that her contributions arrived. Benefits: Done, with a note that the benefits map needs updating because her company changed insurer. Budget: Done, running on automatic transfers. Parents: Done at S$400 a month, going up to S$450 in April under the raise rule she set in lesson 7.2. Loan: Done. She pays S$260 a month and put S$1,000 from her AWS towards it. Insurance: In progress. The brief is written but the follow-up meeting hasn't been held yet, and it is booked for March. Investing: Not started, by choice, until her buffer is complete.
Take the budget plan you made in lesson 4.4 and put your actual savings for the year beside it. You don't need to go through every line. The ones that usually matter most are the buffer, any extra loan payments and the tax set-aside. Where actual and plan differ, the reason for the gap tells you more than its size, so write a short note beside each gap saying why it happened.
Hui Min's plan put S$400 a month into her buffer, or S$4,800 over the year. She paused the transfer twice, once for a friend's wedding and once after a large dental bill, and her monthly transfers came to S$4,000 in total. Her bonus rule from lesson 7.2 sent her AWS into the buffer as well, adding S$1,560. The buffer finished the year at S$4,000 + S$1,560 = S$5,560, which is S$5,560 - S$4,800 = S$760 more than the plan. Her buffer target was S$5,200, so she ended S$5,560 - S$5,200 = S$360 above target.
In her gap notes she wrote that both paused months had real reasons, and that the AWS hadn't appeared in the plan at all. She took from this that a plan should say what happens to bonuses, which her new bonus rule now covers.
Write the review in plain sentences and keep it to half a page. It answers four questions: what went better than expected, what went worse, what surprised you, and what you would tell yourself on your first day of work.
For Hui Min, automatic transfers worked better than she expected. Food delivery spending went worse, creeping up without her noticing until she reached lesson 7.1, "Lifestyle creep happens one reasonable upgrade at a time". What surprised her was that her mother was relieved to agree a fixed monthly amount. Her advice to her first-day self would be to read the benefits guide in week one.
Each of your three goals for year two needs an amount and a date. With both written down, you can look back at the end of year two and tell whether you met each one.
Hui Min's first goal starts in March, when she will move the S$360 above her target into a separate investing pot, followed by her S$520 monthly buffer transfer from then on. Before opening the pot she will compare accounts in the way lesson 7.3 shows. Her second goal is to pay S$1,000 extra into her study loan by 31 December. Her third is to save S$1,500 for a trip to Japan by October, with its own budget line so the money doesn't come out of everyday spending.
None of her goals names a product, and no product is recommended here. Choosing what to invest in is taught in the course "Build and run an ETF portfolio".
Before you count the project as finished, check that it has all four parts: the table with all nine areas marked and every open item dated, the savings comparison with a reason beside each gap, the half-page review, and three goals that each carry an amount and a date.
Put the date at the top and keep it with your other course documents. In a year, the same table becomes the starting point for your second review.
Your raise rule from lesson 7.2 belongs on the same page, because it is the thing most likely to decide how year two turns out.
Fill in the 12-month checklist, write half a page reviewing your first year, and set three goals for year two, each with a date.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).