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.
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:
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