You will be able to find your take-home pay and explain why the budget starts there and not from gross salary.
The number on your offer letter is not the number that reaches your bank. Say your contract says S$4,750 a month. Your first payslip shows a CPF deduction, maybe a small self-help group contribution, and what actually lands in your account is closer to S$3,800. Those figures are an example. Your own payslip has the real ones.
The CPF part isn't gone. It goes into your CPF accounts and still belongs to you. But you can't spend it on rent, food or a Grab ride this month, so it has no place in your budget. How much is deducted depends on your age and your wage, and the rates are set by law and revised from time to time. The CPF Board website lists the current ones. Your employer also pays a share on top of your salary. That share never touches your take-home pay, so you can leave it out of the budget too.
What you budget with is take-home pay: the amount that arrives in your bank account on payday after CPF and any other deductions. In the example, that is S$3,800, not S$4,750. People who plan around the gross figure overspend every month and then wonder where the money went. The gap was never theirs to spend.
Two things make take-home pay harder to pin down than it looks. The first is variable pay. If you earn commission, shift allowances or overtime, your take-home changes from month to month. Budget from your lowest normal month, not your best one, and treat anything above it as extra. The second is the year-end bonus or an annual wage supplement. It may feel like part of your salary, but it isn't promised in the same way, and CPF is deducted from it too. Leave it out of the monthly budget and decide what it is for when it arrives.
If you can't find a payslip, look at your bank statement instead. The salary credit is your take-home pay. Check the last three months. If they differ, use the smallest.
Now write down where that money goes. Start with three buckets. Needs are the bills you can't skip without real consequences: rent or your share of the HDB loan, utilities, transport, your phone plan, groceries and insurance premiums. Wants are everything you choose: eating out, delivery, subscriptions, shopping, travel. The third bucket is future you: savings, paying debt faster than the minimum, and building an emergency buffer.
A simple first target is to split take-home pay into rough thirds across the three. On S$3,800, that is about S$1,267 each. It isn't a rule, and module 2 compares several ways to divide the money so you can pick one you will actually keep. Thirds are just a quick test. Most people are nowhere near them on the first try. Needs often take half or more, especially if you're renting, and future you gets whatever is left at the end of the month, which is usually not much.
That gap is the point of this lesson. You can't fix spending you haven't seen. A budget is not a punishment or a promise to stop enjoying anything. It is a picture of where your money goes, drawn before the month starts instead of discovered after it ends.
Before you change anything, get the starting picture right. Find your take-home pay for the last three months and note the lowest. Then list what you think you spend in each bucket, from memory. The next lessons check that guess against your bank and card statements, and the gap between the two is usually where the money has been going.
Find your take-home pay for the last three months from payslips or salary credits, note the lowest, and list what you think you spend in each bucket from memory.
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