Set the date for every recurring money task in your freelance year.
Pick the calendar you look at every day, on your phone or your computer. Every recurring money date in your year will go into it, each with a reminder set before it. Most late fees, missed deadlines and money surprises in a freelance year come from dates you could have known months in advance. The tax filing deadline falls at roughly the same time every year. Your insurance renews on the same day each year. Your business registration renewal date is printed on your registration. People get caught out by these dates because nobody puts them all in one place.
If you like, create a separate calendar for money dates and give it its own colour. Your money dates are then easy to spot, and the rest of your schedule stays uncluttered. Either way, what matters most is that the reminders reach you.
The dates fall into two groups. Dates you do not choose are deadlines and renewals set by others, such as IRAS, your insurers, ACRA and licensing bodies. Dates you choose are the ones you set yourself: reviews, your CPF contribution, transfer checks and GIRO dates. Enter the first group before the second, because missing one of those dates costs money.
IRAS sets the income tax filing deadline. Look up the current deadline on the IRAS website and enter it. Then add your own target date a few weeks earlier, so that a busy month does not push you past the real one. Lesson 4.4 showed that most of the filing work is done in your records before you file.
The notice of assessment and the MediSave notice arrive after you file, and the timing varies. You cannot know the exact date they will arrive. You can see when they came last year by checking your emails, myTax Portal or your CPF accounts. Put a check date a few weeks after last year's arrival dates. You then go looking for the notices on that date, as lesson 2.3 suggested.
Every insurance policy you hold has a renewal or premium date. Enter each one with the policy name. At each renewal, add a note to check whether the cover still fits your cover map from lesson 6.4.
If you are registered with ACRA, add your business registration renewal date. You can find it in your registration details in BizFile+. If you have a company, also add its filing dates for ACRA and IRAS, and ask your company secretary or accountant to confirm them. Any other licence you hold has its own renewal date, for example a vocational licence for driving, so add those too.
Add four quarterly reviews and use the checklist from lesson 8.1 for each one. Many freelancers pick a date shortly after each quarter ends, such as the second week of January, April, July and October, so that the quarter's bank statements are available. Choose dates you can actually keep.
Make one of the four your annual review. It is a longer version of a quarterly review and covers the things you reset only once a year: your base pay, floor rate and rate sheet from module 7, your structure decision from lesson 5.4, your voluntary CPF decision from lesson 3.4, and your cover map.
If you chose a month for a voluntary CPF contribution in lesson 3.4, add it, ideally in the same month as one of your reviews. Add your monthly base pay transfer date, mainly as a reminder to check that the transfer ran. Add any GIRO dates for tax or MediSave instalments as well, so you know when your pot will be drawn on.
It is easy to miss a date in a calendar on the day itself. Set a reminder one week before every date. A week gives you enough time to act, for example to:
gather your documents for the tax return compare insurance options before a renewal move money into the pot before a GIRO deduction
A reminder on the day itself usually comes too late to do anything except panic. For the larger tasks, such as filing your tax return or holding your annual review, add a second reminder a month ahead.
Mei, the freelancer who runs through this course, built her calendar this way. Her dates here are illustrative. She holds her annual review in December, after her busiest season, when she knows how the year went. Her quarterly reviews fall in the second week of January, April, July and October, and the December year-end review takes the place of a fourth regular one.
The IRAS filing deadline falls in a particular month, and that is the month Mei files her tax return. Her own target date is three weeks before the deadline. She checks for her notice of assessment and MediSave notice a few weeks after the dates they arrived last year. She doesn't hold a shield plan yet, but she has put a renewal check in the month her shield plan will renew, for when she takes one up. She checks her base pay transfer on the 25th of each month. She makes her voluntary CPF contribution in December, after the year-end review. Now that she has registered her business, her registration renewal date is in the calendar too.
Each of her dates has a reminder a week before it. Setting it all up took her about forty minutes. Since then, she has been reminded by her calendar rather than by a late fee.
Open the calendar you use most, and begin with the dates set by other people, since those are the ones that cost money to miss.
Put every money date for the next twelve months in your calendar, each with a reminder one week before.
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