You will be able to collect every transaction from your bank accounts, cards and payment apps into one list.
Ask most people what they spent last month and they can give you a figure within a few seconds. Ask them to prove it and the figure changes. Large fixed costs like rent are easy to remember. The small, frequent spends are the ones that get forgotten: a S$4.50 kopi, a S$23 delivery order at 11pm, a S$15 top-up to a transport card (all example figures). Those small spends decide whether anything is left at the end of the month, so a budget built from memory starts from the wrong number.
To fix this, you collect what you actually spent from every place money leaves you and put it into one list, making sure you miss nothing and count nothing twice.
Wei Ling is 28 and works as an operations executive in Tampines. She is the example person for this whole course, and her figures are invented for teaching. Her take-home pay is S$3,800, the figure from lesson 1.1. When she wrote down her spending from memory, she came to about S$2,900 a month. That should leave S$900 a month for savings, yet her savings account has grown by almost nothing in a year, and her statements are where the gap between those two facts gets explained.
One month of spending can mislead. A month with a wedding, a dental bill or a sale weekend looks expensive, and a quiet month looks cheap. Three months smooths out those swings. It is long enough to show your normal pattern and short enough to collect in one evening.
Use the last three complete months, meaning the three full calendar months before the current one. If today is the 10th of April, those are January, February and March.
The most common mistake is downloading statements for the main bank account and stopping there. Money also leaves through every other channel, and each one needs its own statements. Your list should cover:
the salary account and any other bank account you pay from every credit card, including one you use only for online shopping e-wallets and payment apps you top up, such as GrabPay or a transport card PayNow transfers to friends, family or small shops cash withdrawals
Cash withdrawals count as spending even if you cannot remember what the cash went on. PayNow is easy to miss because it looks like a transfer between people. If you pay a friend back for your share of a dinner bill, that is spending on eating out, so label each PayNow line by what it was really for rather than leaving it as a transfer.
Wei Ling's list had five items: her salary account, a main credit card, a second card she keeps for online shopping, an e-wallet she tops up for rides and food, and PayNow. When she made her guess she had forgotten the second card, which averaged S$240 a month.
Most Singapore banks let you download statements from internet banking, usually as a PDF and often as a CSV that opens in a spreadsheet. Look under "statements" or "e-statements" in the bank's app or website. Card issuers offer the same. If your bank only gives PDFs, many spreadsheet tools can import a table from a PDF, or you can type the lines in by hand, which is slow the first time and much quicker after that. Download three months from each source and paste everything into one sheet.
Once every statement is in one sheet, the risk reverses: you stop missing spending and start counting it twice, usually through card bill payments, e-wallet top-ups and transfers between your own accounts.
The first is the credit card bill payment. Wei Ling buys groceries on her card for S$86. A month later her salary account shows a S$1,140 payment to the card, and that payment includes the S$86. If both lines stay on the list, the groceries are counted twice. Count a card purchase once, when you make it. Delete the card bill payment from the salary account lines and keep the individual purchases from the card statement, because those purchases are the real spending.
The second is the e-wallet. Say you top up S$50 from a card and spend it on three rides. Count either the top-up or the three rides, never both. The individual spends are more useful, because each one can go under its real category, so the rides go under transport. A top-up tells you nothing about what was bought. If the wallet app cannot export individual transactions, keep the top-up and label it with what you mostly use the wallet for.
The third is transfers to yourself, meaning money moved between your own accounts in either direction. Wei Ling moves S$100 a month from her salary account to a savings account, and sometimes moves money back from savings to salary when she runs short. Neither is spending, so remove both kinds of transfer from the list. Keep a separate note of how much you moved into savings. In lesson 1.3 that amount goes into the "future you" bucket, as money set aside rather than money spent.
After removing card payments and transfers to herself, Wei Ling had 214 transactions over three months. Her regular spending averaged S$3,410 a month, before a one-off cost in December. That is about S$500 more than her guess of S$2,900, and most of the difference came from the second card, PayNow and the e-wallet.
Your finished list needs three columns: date, amount, and the description from the statement. Add a fourth column for the account or card each line came from, so you can trace anything that looks wrong, and then sort the whole list by date.
Don't categorise anything yet. Categorising is the next lesson, and it goes much faster when the list is already complete and clean.
Set aside an hour for this. Open each bank and card app in turn, download the three months and paste them into one sheet.
Download three months of statements for every account and card you use and combine the transactions into one list with date, amount and description.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).