Don't drink large Iced tea lite

Lately I've been reading stuffs on how to spend your money wisely. Yes I guess I've come to my senses now where the initial fascination I had over buying a car has gradually waned and has been replaced by the realization that this really is not a good time to be buying anything you could temporarily live without. To my credit, I knew that it was just a phase although it had, for a time, consumed my fancy.

I am not really a spendthrift kind of guy when it comes to buying food. Same goes to my choice of transpo as evidenced by my preference for riding a taxi from Edsa on the way to office and back. My budget is easily setback by 200 bucks just by those two taxi trips alone. As for food, I constantly find myself buying a large iced tea lite, and sometimes with fries, on the way home before riding the bus. So long as it is for food, I don't scrimp on shelling out money.

Perhaps being single and having nothing to worry about setting aside for living expenses for the wife and kids allow me to be a little generous with my daily expenses even though good sense tells me that I could be a little more frugal.

So I did a run down on how I've been financially behaving for the several years that I have worked since graduating from school. For reference, I went by with the wise advice which promotes saving at least twenty percent of your monthly salary. So I made this excel file. On one column I wrote down each working year. On another column, the base salary. A third column for the base salary multiplied by twelve months. And the last column multiplying the previous one to 0.2(twenty percent)

Adding all the twenty percent for every working year I supposedly was to save, I am still short for a certain amount although this is something I could still save since I projected the completion of a working year up to December. Deriving a pro rated value up to the last full month of April, I was able to compute that I've just been saving 17.8% instead of 20%.

The funny thing however is that the 17.5% wasn't uniformly spread throughout every working year. I know for a fact that I've saved a considerable amount just now and if it weren't for that, my saving habits for the years before would definitely look bad say just about.....10%. It's only now that I've recouped yet I am still 2.2% short.

Compared to my peers, I am not doing a heck of a job saving money. Three years ago, a friend whose salary closely equaled mine was able to buy a second hand car, spend for his wedding, lost 40k in a pyramiding scam, bought a motorcycle a couple of years earlier, and was able to save enough money to pay for the migration processing fees and is now in another country with his wife and kids.

He was quite the spendthrift and I am amazed to how much he was able to stretch his budget with a meager salary.