Finally, a month when I might be able to associate the word “frugal” with our expenses without feeling too sheepish. Even though there was CNY to contend with, it was balanced out by the relatively short month.

We spent about $3,500 and we finally managed to reduce some expenses with regards to eating out, especially at restaurants.

Let’s see if we can keep this up in March.

Eating Out: $432.20

Hawker ($183.20) – This is a short month and I dare say after a couple of years of adjustment, we will be cutting down on “eating out for the sake of eating out.”

Chilling out at this Toast Box outlet once a week or fortnight are still in the plans. 

Fast Food ($41) – 1 meal each at Burger Up, McDonald’s and WingStop.

Restaurants ($208) – Amazingly, there’s just 4 entries on this front. With most restaurants replacing value-for-money set lunch menus with higher-margin CNY menus, we literally stopped dining out at them.

Groceries: $302

Supermarket ($147) – 4 trips to NTUC Finest @Waterway Point as we took advantage of some 3 Day CNY Special deals to stock up in our store room and Fridge. At one point, we had 10 boxes of blueberries and 8 tubs of Haagen Daazs.

I am a sucker for such deals…

Wet Market ($155) – 3 trips to the Kovan market on Thur mornings. One of them was to get fresh but super-overpriced prawns a couple of weeks ago.

Beverages & Snacks: $102

I bought another batch of nuts from SnackFirst and other entries included some kueh, yogurt and bubble tea.

Incredibly, another 1kg of satay cashew nuts is almost all gone!

Utilities: $203.02

Electricity, Gas & Water ($99.92) – Electricity usage was about 285kWh for this month. 37KWh of gas and 7.4 Cu M of water meant the bill added up to $99.92.

Cellphones ($103.10) – $51.55 each. Both our plans comes with upsized data to 7GB. Think it’s likely I will shift this to the fixed expenses side during the next update as it’s super unlikely for us to exceed the data plan these days.

Transport: $50

1 EZ Reload transaction for me.

Departmental: $72

Clothes ($72) – Some items from Decathlon and the Mrs bought a Puma sports top for her Yoga lessons too. 

This is the Decathlon that we frequent at City Square Mall.

Work: $173

Books and Notes ($40) – Some papers/notes purchased online.

Electronics ($133) – 2 parallel toners and drum for the printer. This should last us for the whole of 2018.

Miscellaneous: $500

Gifts ($500) – This is the net amount of Ang Baos we gave out during CNY.

Total: $1,834,22
Overall Total: $3,495.22 (included fixed expenses of $1,661)

“Those who attend to small expenses are always rich” – John Adams

Thanks for reading.