I recently discovered Sankey budget diagrams on Reddit and the geeky side of me finds this very cool! 😎 Here's how my cash flow looks like on a monthly basis!
An overview of my monthly budget, built with Sankeymatic
Building this diagram was a lot of fun and now I have a clearer picture of my daily expenses and fixed bills. Before this, I knew how much I was spending but I did not know exactly how much money I was saving every month. Armed with this clarity, I can plan ahead for investment purchases making sure that I don't dip into my house fund or emergency savings.
If you're looking for a big picture of how you're managing your money, I highly recommend building your own sankey diagram. It doesn't take up much time, especially if you're already tracking your expenses, and it should last quite a while unless you foresee major changes to your income/expenses in the near future.
Stocks Cafe
Just wanted to do a quick shout out about Stocks Cafe here. If you're not already familiar with it, Stocks Cafe is a portfolio tracking and management tool that provides a comprehensive suite of features to help you manage your investments, track dividends and screen for stocks. It is built and maintained by a Singaporean and has excellent coverage for all locally listed stocks and bonds including SSBs!
I am generally quite prudent in my purchases and will sit on a decision to buy something for a few days/weeks second guessing if my decision to buy the item is based on a genuine need or frivolous want. For Stocks Cafe though, within half an hour of tinkering in the app, I decided to pick up their annual plan for a very affordable $39. Been using it for a week now and I love it!
Importing your past trades is a breeze and the user interface is simple and straightforward to use. The 2 things I really like best about Stocks Cafe are:
- I no longer have to manually calculate my XIRR or annualized yields via Excel or worry about getting the calculation formula wrong. Stocks Cafe does that automatically and even projects your expected dividend for the rest of the year/next year. This means more time to focus on researching stocks.
- The creator, Evan Koh, is super active on the app (my Friend status was updated within minutes of payment) and is regularly improving the app based on bug reports or feature requests (accessible to Friends only). Solving for customer success is a hallmark of a great product, so kudos to Evan!
Check out the tool here: https://stocks.cafe/v3/intro?referral_code=joceyng
That's my affiliate link up there which will give you 2 months free access to the paid features of the tool. In all transparency, Stocks Cafe's referral program will "cashback" 20% of any amount you contribute as a Friend of StocksCafe, to my account balance as referral fees which I can use to extend my Friend status. Click here for more details about the Stocks Cafe referral program.
This is a non-sponsored post and I am sharing this purely because I really like Stocks Cafe, I appreciate the time and effort that the creator puts into building and maintaining this and I hope it stays around for a long, long time 