Early 20s fresh graduate:

Car loan: Rm 600
Parents: Rm 500
LRT: Rm 100
Food expenses: Rm 200
Miscellaneous: Rm 200

How does it look

water + eletricity - 250
parents - 300
mobile -60
internet - 100
insurance (per annual) - 1200
petrol- 150
TnGo (2mths) - rm50
food - 1000
entertaiment : movie, sport - 60
groceries (per mth) - 250


I think my commitment consider very low after I  compare to other haha.

movies just once a while, I take badminton sport just once a week. Clothing very less. Travel not much.

Food - 1.5k
Entertainment/Clothes - 500
Parking - 250
Petrol - 250
Housing - 1k
Gym - 200

Roughly 3.7k per month, which is half my clean salary.
I consider myself a big spender.

This exclude car insurance/servicing, festive money to parents, holidays ...

Do you pass your parents a monthly allowance?

Good son! They invested time and effort and sweat and tears in our upbringing. It's a blessing for us to be able to give a little back

I'm giving them up to 15% of my monthly gross income.

Looking back this thread my monthly expenses change drastically due to marriage and housing loan commitment.
.
Food rm1000
Grocer etc rm 800
Housing loan rm8000
Entertainment  and shopping rm500
Mom rm1000
Gf rm500
Fuel and transport rm1000
Insurance rm800
Utility rm700
Travel rm 500

Monthly commitment almost 14k +

Actually, looking at some of the expenses listed by some of you here, the cost of living in Malaysia can vary quite a bit!

I'll share my monthly expenses pre and post COVID-19 - just to give a different perspective of how COVID-19 has affected the economy:

Pre-COVID:

Cluster Landed Detached Residence monthly maintenance/sinking fund: $1,500/pm
Private home lift servicing, pro-rated: $200/pm
Utilities (water/electricity/waste disposal): $300/pm
Property Tax on primary residence (owner-occupier preferential rate, pro-rated)*: $400/pm
Road Tax (two cars, pro-rated): $199/pm x 2 = $398/pm
Petrol costs: $250/pm x 2 = $500/pm
Charity donations (combined): $2,000/pm
Meals (we hardly - ok, never - cook): $3,000/pm (this includes the occasional fine dining experience, maybe once or twice a month)
Local part-time cleaners: $800/pm
Hobbies/Club membership expenses: $400/pm
Discretionary spending: $1,000/pm
Overseas travel (tickets, hotels, food)** pro-rated: $5,167/pm
Children education/living/upbringing expenses: $0
Elders support/expenses: $0 (not counting the red packets that my wife and I give my uncles and aunties in Hong Kong & Malaysia 2 or 3 times a year, whenever we visit them - those are incidental & what I term as occasional gifts, although I do make it a point to give generously: I only have 2 姑姑 (aunties) & their husbands (姑丈) in Malaysia and 2 叔叔 (uncles) & their wives (婶婶) in HK). My parents unfortunately passed away when I barely turned 30.

Without taking our Singapore tax burden into consideration, it looks like our outgoing expenses are about $16,000 per month.

*I've deliberately not taken into consideration the property taxes, council fees, land taxes, sinking funds, maintenance fees, recurrent agent/leasing fees that our investment residential & commercial properties attract. The rationale behind this is that each individual property is self-sustaining & generating positive cash flow, as there are no mortgages to service, and the rental returns easily outstrip the expenses incurred. The same principle applies to the properties in Australia.

**We usually travel about once every two months and we've successfully maintained our individual SQ PPS status for the past 5 years. Minimum spending per annum to re-qualify for PPS status is $25,000 per person in airfares. We visit Sydney, HK and Liverpool for a week each, at least once a year, to see (and stay with) family. Otherwise, it's usually a week away elsewhere and I'll estimate $2,000 for hotels and $2,000 for food per trip outside of visiting family. I think this is by far the biggest ticket item in terms of our expenses. We only started incurring these travel bills in the past 5 years or so - after my wife and I had an epiphany and started asking the pertinent question of "what if we're too old to see the world, by the time we think we can finally afford to"?

Post COVID:

Cluster Landed Detached Residence monthly maintenance/sinking fund: $1,500/pm
Private home lift servicing, pro-rated: $200/pm
Utilities (water/electricity/waste disposal): $400/pm (air-conditioning is switched on more often at home now, and wife is working from home)
Property Tax on primary residence (owner-occupier preferential rate, pro-rated)*: $400/pm
Road Tax (two cars, pro-rated): $199/pm x 2 = $398/pm
Petrol costs: $250/pm x 2 = $200/pm (my wife primarily works from home, while I still have to drive to the practice & occasionally to the hospital)
Charity donations (combined): $2,000/pm
Meals: $1,000/pm  - no more fancy dining, but we've been using Foodpanda, Grab and/or Deliveroo way more often, although she's also started to cook some simple meals!
Local part-time cleaners: $800/pm
Hobbies/Club membership expenses: $1/pm (since we can't use our country club & its facilities, the club gave us a rebate and only charged $1 for membership fee until its full facilities are reopened)
Discretionary spending: $500/pm
Overseas travel (tickets, hotels, food) pro-rated: $0
Children education/living/upbringing expenses: $0
Elders support/expenses: $0

Post COVID, our outgoing expenses have nearly halved to about $8,000 per month.

It's very telling what COVID has done to the economy on a global scale. Imagine replicating this result worldwide. No wonder airlines and hotels and restaurants are suffering.

Yes, I’ve given a 20% offset to my tenants in Singapore - both residential and commercial ones, and one of my master tenant in Australia requested for rental waiver of 24% for the 3 months from April to June as they rent a few suites from as part of their hotel operations, thus only paying 74% of their obligations.

My ASEAN patients can’t come to Singapore so that’s affecting the practice. I would say the practice’s revenue is down by about 30%.

Everyone is affected - I should feel grateful that we are debt free and living rather modestly so the effect isn’t as adverse or severe. But everyone is affected.

Good man, but a balance is also equally important - so as not to deprive yourself the experience of the journey, else when the destination is reached, one might find oneself unable to execute all those previous plans because age has overtaken all good intentions. As we approach our 5th decade, we can already feel our bodies not being as robust as they used to be. For example, after 3 hours in the theatre, hunched over a patient, it's not uncommon for me to get a backache that refuses to go away unless I pop a couple of pills. Or see my physiotherapist.

And, I can't stress how important it is to start saving as early as possible - and, COVID-19 has also taught me that previously rock solid passive income streams can change in the blink of an eye! I mean, the master tenant that leased a few of our units in Sydney to run as part of his hotel operations has been a faithful tenant and never missed a day of payment for the past 10 to 12 years! Imagine our dismay when we received this letter from his lawyers:

[attachmentid=10533780]

At least they were being as fair to us as possible (and thank goodness our units there have no mortgages on them) - but it only goes to show that there's a lot of uncertainty going on, and I don't think it's fully settled yet - not by a long shot.

Being conservative and not be over-leverage is probably the best play for now.