I just realized today that I have been dealing with Budgeting and Financial Planning at work, and at school and have not done enough for our home! It all started with setting our target budget for our upcoming US Trip, which up to now does not have a definite date yet. Since it's supposed to be a relaxing break for us we said that we will set the date when we have reached a certain percentage of our Travel Budget. This was how we came up with our budget:
(in USD)
1,360 -Airfare (MNL-LAX-MNL)
2,300 -Meal and transportation allowance
560 -Train
1,300 -Airfare within the US
------------
5,520 or PHP 253,920
This is of course a conservative estimate as I'm still not familiar with how VUSA works, I just took the rates from the internet.
The next step of course was to have an assessment of how much we can afford. What I did was to allocate our income among the various REQUIRED expenses, and I came up with the following:
32% - Income tax
11% - Home mortgage
10% - Car mortgage
8% - Transportation expenses
4% - Groceries
4% - Daily meal allowance
4% - Electricity
1% - Water, telephone, internet
1% - Insurance
----
75%
What a realization that if only we can control the NON-REQUIRED expenses, we can easily save 25% of our income every month! Well, it's not too late. And little by little we are learning to manage with less. We now eat at home more, we don't watch movies as much in the cinema (I was shocked to learn that it now costs P160 per person to watch a movie), we don't have household help (which means no salary to pay and less grocery expenses), and other little things that we have learned to do without.
We are currently working on a November or a January schedule for our trip so that we can leave on non-peak periods at work. Hopefully by then, we have saved enough, and maybe a little extra for some shopping :-)
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6 comments:
o ayan. nag comment na ako. sa finance entry pa. hehehe.
o ayan. nag comment na ako. sa finance entry pa. hehehe.
Haha, wala namang comment e... next time habaan mo naman! :-)
Part of the fun in any journey is planning and preparing for it, so enjoy this stage as well!
One thing I saw from comparing your budget with ours is that we are spending so much more on food and groceries. The dollar is down and so are stocks. Does the financial planner and analyst see any bright spot in the horizon?
HI!! What a pleasant surprise! Yes, we do spend a lot on food and groceries, pero di ba necessary expenses? Siguro we can make adjustments for some items that we can do without or find cheaper alternatives (generic brands, discounted items etc). For investment instruments, yes, in general the market (interest rates, dollars) is down, but we can still find some good stocks to invest in. (something we can talk about when we see each other, baka ma-demanda ako rito).
Yes we are having so much with the planning!
should have bought meralco last Friday (Aug 17) at P74, that should have been a whopping 20% profit over the long weekend... if only i had a crystal ball
i was about to make a similar comment on your groceries, grabe 4%, i think ours come up to about 10%. then again if our base is lower then that's not at all improbable ;-)
ms
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