Have a financial goal? Try Budgeting!

Awhile ago, an article on budgeting came out on TODAY. It covered on how you can manage your money by budgeting.

Budgeting has always been a way for me to portion my money. I wouldn't say that I am super proficient in budgeting but I just like to give myself an estimate amount that I can spend or not spend.




It actually all started in polytechnic when I took up part-time jobs. I wasn't saving for anything as I haven't gotten into investing and wasn't planning to save for any big ticket item.

I just enjoyed seeing the balance in my bank account increase.

It just felt great as my balance increased from a 3 digit to 4 digit balance.

So what I would do is to estimate the amount I want to save then with that in mind, I would know how much I have to spend.




I would then divide what I can spend into the remaining days of the month. In this way, I would know what my budget was for each day and if I exceeded, I would restrict myself on other days.

That worked well until now. With much more expenses and also different categories of spending, I have been lazy to track my expenses.

But in the new year of 2019, I would start tracking more vigilantly although I do not want to be too obsessed with it at the same time.
 
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Income Inequality and Education Causing a Divide in Singapore?

There has been a video going around and it has been gaining a lot of attention among Singaporeans especially during this period of exams where PSLE and O levels are around the corner.



If you haven't seen the video yet, here it is.



In the video, it starts with interviews of young kids of around 9-11 years of age. One girl mentioned that if you owned 'branded items' like smiggle bags and smiggle pencil cases, you would be the most popular kid.

When I was young in primary school, I kinda felt it as well, from OP bags to converse school shoes, we did have a kid who would own all these items but she wouldn't be the popular kid unless she was fun to be around.




I can really feel the pressure for kids nowadays who want to match up to their popular friends, my tutee who is 12 years old, have also told me that she hated that she has a Lenovo phone and not an iPhone. All her friends has iPhone and that it is cool to own one.

She also mentioned to me that they went to Starbucks after school and it was really cool of her friend to have a gift card which she really wanted. Wow, when I was in primary school, I still didn't know what Starbucks was.

But the real highlight in the video is when the interviewees were aged 15-17 as this is the age where they have been 'categorized' by their PSLE score and would soon be 'categorized' by their A, O and N level scores as well.




There was a obvious difference between the interviewees when the second question of 'what expectations do you have for yourself?' was being asked. From then on, there was a clear divide among the students in the Integrated programme (IP) than the rest.

For me, I went to a government secondary school, Saint Anthony's Canossian Secondary and I wasn't performing that well. To be honest, my mum actually just wanted me to pass all my subjects and if possible, get into a course in Polytechnic which I managed to.

To be honest, I have always been poor performing in my family, with cousins who all went to JCs, like VJC and ACJC, I was intimidated at every family gathering when aunts and cousins would ask me about my choices.



It definitely did cause a divide between me and my cousins as the common subjects we could talk about was limited.

Even my brother did pretty well for O levels as well. However, when he got into the elite JC that he always wanted, in the first year, he went to the principal to request for a change of class to another where some of his friends were in as he felt that the class he was in was too competitive and everyone was so 'on' about studying.

When he was talking to his dean about it, his dean told him that changing his class would prove to be a wrong choice as he was dropping out of the good class.

Well, he didn't end up too bad and also obtained a scholarship in the end to study overseas. He told me that many of his friends who went to other JCs like Temasek, Tampines and Meridian actually did very well and some even better than him but because of the way the school operates, many of his friends were not aware of scholarships and overseas opportunities that they could have gotten.



Between me and my brother, I am not very good at even general knowledge and sometimes he do get baffled that I am not aware of certain information which according to him is general knowledge but I believe that because my brother and I come from a low-middle income family, friendship is not really based on money and results and we can empathize more. I do feel that the divide between high income Singaporeans and low income Singaporeans is getting wider and it is not an easy problem to deal with.

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Graduating from a Polytechnic

In Singapore, when you reach 12 years old, you do PSLE to determine your next place of study and at 16, you take O levels to continue on. O levels is a little more interesting than PSLE as the options get more diverse where you can either choose a junior college route or polytechnic as your next level of study.

For me, I chose polytechnic after O levels as my results restricted only to a few JCs which I felt wasn’t the right choice for me. What also made me chose to go to a polytechnic was that since young, I am a more hands-on person and not really book smart. So when I was making my choice, my mum assisted me in choosing and deciding on what I can consider.

I chose a science course in polytechnic as I was originally interested to working in the hospital as a testing laboratory staff. I chose Biotechnology as my first choice and got into it. I can still vividly recall year 1 of my studies which was the most difficult time in my 3 years because I didn’t take any chemistry in secondary school and the first year modules were mostly chemistry. I struggled really badly and even cried in front of my care teacher. She explained to me how it was and what decisions I could make. In the end, my friends helped me with the basics and I continue improving. After the first year, everything seemed better as it went more into

                                                                                   biology which was what I looked forward to.

In year 3, we all went through a 6 months internship and I think that was what made me think much more about my future and what I wanted to do. The 6 months of being in a laboratory and handling the research project brought me to think that maybe a laboratory job wasn’t what I wanted after all.

Even though I didn’t want to continue doing a laboratory job, my supervisor told me that there are much more different jobs that I could try after graduating. I think the final year was a time when most poly students start thinking about their future and planning their journey. I wasn’t sure if I would like a degree in science so that’s why I took a gap year to work and experience it. I have to say that polytechnic was a time of growing for me. I wasn't taught all the skills in school that I could applied in my first job but it definitely helped me in having the basics and expectations in place.

Being from poly have definitely given me the chance to mature much more and to give a better thought to my future. I believe that if I had gone to JC, I wouldn’t have gotten involved in financial preparation in terms of investing and also wouldn’t think so much about my future. Even though I do not know if I would have maybe turned out better or worse in JC, I benefited from my time in polytechnic and if i was given a choice to choose again, I definitely would choose the same.