Interesting, I've been working on a retirement calculator separately too, maybe I'll see how I can incorporate that into this spreadsheet too

How it looks like right now:


Each row denotes month, where
Increment rate applies yearly (12, 24...)
Inflation rate applies monthly.
But it's still flawed and WIP right now.... I can see right now I'm incorrectly "restarting" my expense at 5000 upon retirement lol.

I'm personally a huge fan of YNAB hence sticking with it for now
Huge fan of zero-based budgeting.

U very detailed & hard working - zero-based budgeting will kill me .

personally, i use Excel + "take-out savings for investing & buffer first" simplified budgeting
ie. i just put aside my net monthly income 20% or 80% windfall income (bonus) and use the rest, and if have extras at month end, throw more into savings for investing & buffer

my zero based got abit leeway one I track down to maybe ringgit / tens ringgit level and not down to cents level (eg my YNAB can never tie with my bank account balances)

I only use ynab to ensure that my big items & daily living spends are captured (eg salary, needs/wants, etc) as a form of check & balance. Because otherwise I will end up spending everything

How do you plan your one-time expenses then? Say... if you think you'd like to buy a new furniture, or travel overseas. Curious to see how everyone else plans their budget.

I find it so hard to wrap my head around this method lol. First it's something that is supposed to track things down to cents, but at the same time you're not. I googled to catch a glimpse of it, I see it has budget by month, but without dates - how are you ensuring you have your money ready at the right times of the month? Say, it's all budgeted to 0, but next month/budget, you have a lot of expenses coming in early but inflow would be at the end of the month? Does your budget sheet tell you how much you need to ready for the next month?

one time big expenses? if i planned any, it'll be accumulated monthly into my saving-for-spending pile.

FYI - i dont travel physically (hermit) + i buy large furniture/appliances like once in 10 to 15 years, even car, once in 15-22 years XD
eg. i'm only on my third & first brand new car

i used to be using that t-harv ekar method of:
50% for necessities
10% for savings
10% for fun / feel good
10% for education
10% for long-term saving to spend (big ticket items)
10% for charity / do good
very useful for targeting, control & visualization
BUT
pain in the butt when accumulated the discipline to spend way lower than i earn (10+ years to do so),
thus
switched over to simplified save net salary of 20% for investing & buffering (80% if windfall), then spend the rest carefully + if any extras month end put into investing & buffering.

note - all passive income are reinvested or form part of my cache for investing. above is just for net salary & net bonus (i'm worker ant je)

now, close to retirement, already put in my papers - semi-FIRE at 49.
soon i'll be spending 80% of my dividends & reinvesting 20% of them.

hope the above helps - IMHO, we just gotta find something that works for our personal characteristics AND before even that, have a BURNING WHY to do so (budgeting/cash flow management +financial planning & execution). Without the WHYs, no point, no reason thus blah blah blah whatever (ie. wont be a priority thus keep failing it)

This post has been edited by wongmunkeong: Jul 16 2021, 11:16 AM

just thinking, will any just in case black swan events,...mkts crashed n stayed bad for few years,...will the dividend be impacted as you need 80% from it for your retirement expenses?

This post has been edited by MUM: Jul 16 2021, 11:37 AM

yeah, agreed.
Be prepared for the worse, hope for the best

My calc is based on 2/3 of my 2020 dividends & i've cash backup based on flexi mortgage re-drawal + SSPN if needed

good reserves...
but if your are retired,...after having "withdrawed" for those to supplement,....
i am just concerned of the method of replenishing those

there's where the long game is - other than dividend stocks & REITs, also holding "normal equities" + didnt count stuff like SSPN % and cash backs XD

Wow, not bad with so much charts and graphs.

so it is more to just this then "soon i'll be spending 80% of my dividends & reinvesting 20% of them".

Not the guy you replied to, but I use YNAB as well.

I have various categories of discretionary spending like Fun Money and Stuff I forgot to Budget For (this is very important as a residual catch-all), so those categories are used sparingly for big one-offs to annualize the costs. Fun Money includes travel for me, so if I'm allocating RM500 a month for that, I'll be able to spend RM6,000 on travel if I don't spend it anywhere else.

Re: Early-in-the-month expenses, the trick is to always live on last month's salary. Using this trick will also allow you to keep a 5 month emergency fund rather than 6.

This post has been edited by S_SienZ: Jul 16 2021, 01:28 PM

Oh actually yes, that's exactly what I do too, in this spreadsheet. Ending balance needs to be more than the next month's total expenses, else you get a red alert. Didn't think about that trick part but I guess now I can +1 month when I tell people how many months of savings I have haha.

Well the idea of YNAB as I understand it, is to have every penny working on something, be it your (future) expenses, or investments. Setting aside some placeholder pot of money sounds counterintuitive especially if you set up multiple of them, but then they're not actually being used in that exact category... It's like later on you need to do a mental math that the RM 6000 you're about to spend on the travel, was already paid for by your past 1 year savings into the Fun Pot.

For my method, though, you can plan out your future travel by simply plotting that RM 6000 on June 2022, and then see the summary telling you how your budget would look like, all the way from now to the end of that year (strictly speaking you'd need 2 sheets for this example as of my post now, but yes, there is cross-sheet linking feature already).

So, I'm starting to understand more now why is it so difficult to convince someone to change their ways of managing their finances, if they already have a system: because the process is so different, it's hard to adapt! I definitely would not want to use that app 😂

I guess over the years I've developed workarounds for it which like you said formed a system - I prefer an annualized view of costs (in fact I often do this in my head when buying a large ticket item, divide by 12) as it allows me to have a fixed budget every month regardless of one-off purchases, this takes out a lot of decision making fatigue which is valuable to someone who is prone to analysis paralysis like myself. About money not being "used", I usually park those categories of funds in Stashaway Simple (MMF) so that it is technically "working" in the meantime.

Started using YNAB 4 in 2015 before that was using excel too Excel is a good tool but for tedious tracking is difficult to achieve what I want and all my balances in YNAB is reconcile to my bank/cc balance.

YNAB has help a lot from the day I started using till now, if based back on my salary in 2015 my emergency/savings now is worth 4 years of salary before that I don't even have 5k savings.

If based on my income now, my emergency/savings is around 1.5 years only.

I don't track daily expenses anymore as most of the daily expenses is paid through ewallet. For big ticket items I will always paid by installments and this the reason I never separate my pots for different purpose.

I do used excel to track my investments and the new YNAB I personally feel is not that flexible compare to the one I'm using.

It's been a while - my latest update throws away the clunky big FD sheet, replacing it with EF (emergency funds). It's much more flexible and easier to use. Mainly catered towards increased use of more short term investments aside from FD where its interest rate has been disappointing.

More details in my 2nd post happy planning!

Question/Survey:
I'd like to add a functionality to easily increase budget for multiple categories due to inflation, however I realised it's not easy because inflation is not one-size-fits-all; food inflation feels like at least 10%, but it's not as painful elsewhere.

So initially, I wanted to
- configure the inflation %
- choose which categories I want to apply the inflation % to
- run as a one-off, upon rolling out new annual budget for the next year (or just apply it to current year because fuck 2022 inflations!)

But what I have in mind above feels awkward due to the reason I mentioned earlier, it's like an overkill feature I'd rather just manually look through my budget sheet and adjust with a calculator on the side.

So... What do you think about such a feature? Would it be a nice to have? What other ideas do you have for such functionality, or what's your wishlist?

Hello it's been a long while! 20230422 update sempena Hari Raya: Version 20 and 21!
- Updated based on LHDN table for YA 2022: https://www.hasil.gov.my/en/individual/indi...me/tax-reliefs/
- Added Tax-exempt Gifts section in [NonEssentials], which is also extracted by [Setup] for the corresponding [Income Tax - Reliefs] calculation.
- Removed deprecated sheet [FD] and all references to it. Added script to force recalculate current sheet in case of Upgrade macro timeout.
- Known performance issue: Upgrade macro tends to exceed 6-minute timeout, resulting in incomplete process (upgrade failure). I will look into improvements.

20230701 update (version 23):
Updated sheets
1. [Summary]:
- Income and Expenses: added two subcategories each as grouped rows.
- Summary chart: now visualises income and expenses into two sub-categories.
- Cumulative summary: separated starting balance for clarity.
- Removed 3rd chart that became redundant.
- Debit/Credit weightage: new and improve section (replacing "Categories %" and Income distribution). Debit (money in) vs. Credit (money out) is visualised in a balanced sheet: rows of the same colour will aggregate to exactly 100%.
2. [Upgrade]: updated mappings to latest version.
3. [Net Worth Summary]: Fixed formula

Updated scripts:
- appsscript.json - Fixed authentication requirement
- General - added GetTabColor function to fix deprecated code
- macros - fixed "Clear all data" script to clean up template correctly.
- Upgrade - improved performance by grouping spreadsheet rows/columns manipulations. Also refresh more fields.

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There should be no more performance issue with upgrade macro now