In my previous post on Why You Should Track Your Expenses, I said that the largest expenses of the SC household are housing, transport, healthcare and insurance. For most households the situation won’t be too different, but first steps first, start tracking and tabulating!
Housing
For housing, I now consider the cash flow rather than what I did before which was to consider only interest costs on the home loan and ignore principal repayments. I ignored those repayments because I saw it as “long term savings” as the equity in the house can be unlocked upon a sale. However, Ms.K talked some sense into me and I finally realised admitted to myself that the cash flow from our portfolio needed to be higher just to service the loan installments so consequently the investment portfolio had to be larger too. So now we’re working to reduce this significantly and we’ll share the results once that has taken place.
Transport
In terms of transport, our costs have recently increased because we bought a car. We used to take taxis, buses and trains everywhere even with two kids. Having said that, we’ve been able to somewhat alleviate the costs of car ownership by Grab Hitching. 🙂
(Do consider using this Grab referral link if you decide to sign up so that both of us get a bit of something :D. REFERRAL LINK)
Should our travel situation improve such that our travel times to work using public transport isn’t too heavy, we may decide to do without a car again. (mixed feelings)
Healthcare
Our strategy to healthcare is prevention is better than cure. 🙂 Team SippingCoconuts try our best to ensure that we have an active lifestyle by always taking the kids outdoors to run, play and look beyond the four walls of home. Us parents get our exercise chasing after the juniors. 😀 It goes without saying that the exercise helps reduce the chances of developing many diseases, and even things like prevention of myopia in children. (Yay, no $$$ to spectacles, contact lenses, or LASIK)
Besides that we try to eat healthy. Almost all meals aside from lunch at work are home cooked, which again helps our wallets. In fact, I probably should convince Ms. K to start an Instagram series of her lunch box because she’s been prepping meals to work recently, so she’s eating almost 100% homecooking.
For actual medical expenses, I have basic coverage for GP visits from work and we have hospitalisation insurance to cover other risks.
I haven’t seen much opportunity here from a cost savings perspective, but we’ll keep looking. 😉
Insurance
How we’re (partially) dealing with the issue of insurance is in a past post which shows how we’re reducing our insurance premiums by 33%.
Besides reducing life insurance, we’ve also decided to restructure our PA insurance which is a bit over the top currently. I estimate that I can reduce this to 1/3 of the current amount we’re paying.
GOAL
This is the goal folks…
Do you have any other areas where you’ve noticed opportunities to save? Please comment and let us know. 🙂
