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This Week’s Money Tip: Keep Your Money Management Simple
If you’re into personal finance topic for some time, you may notice some financial content creators seem to have all kinds of credit cards and investments.
They grab every money opportunity available and intend to maximize their gains.
But do we really need to do all that?
I don’t know about you, but I feel exhausted to follow their steps. Instead of being inspiring, it demotivates me to manage my money.
After managing my money for a decade (started out in 2014 as a fresh graduate), I realized one thing.
Simplicity is always a better approach to money management.
I start to apply minimalism in my life since 2018 when I stumbled the blog by @TheMinimalists
— Marcus Keong (@marcus_keong) October 20, 2020
Slowly I realize we don't only apply it to things we own, but also on our finance, investments, phone apps, and even friends around us.
Keep it simple and what's important to us.
Why?
1) Easy to Understand
Remember the subject “Add Math” back in our Secondary school? I think we all can agree that this subject is super tough to score, or even pass.
The reason? Because it’s not simple.
So it’s a bad idea to make your personal finance feels like another lesson of “Add Math”.
If our personal finance is as simple as Primary School’s math, it becomes easier to understand. Thus we have more motivation to manage our money.
2) Higher Chance to Take Action
I had a poll asking my Twitter followers which one they prioritize when comes to saving more money.
62.7% of them choose reduce expense.
But the truth is, increasing income is better in saving more money because it has no limit on how much we can save.
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The reason why most people choose to reduce expenses because it is simpler.
When we human make decision, we always prefer to choose the simpler one. That’s because our human brain always prefers simple things.
If you make things simple, it reduces friction and increase your chance of taking action.
3) Less Stress, Higher Focus
There’s a reason why our human brain prefer simple. It is because our brain doesn’t need to process too much information and thus lesser burden on it.
When we have less stress on our brain, we can focus better.
If we can focus better, we will make better money decisions in the long run.
Now you understand the reasons behind it. But where to start?
Here are the areas you can simplify, along with my preference (not a must)
1) Credit cards: Use 1 only
2) E-wallet: Use 1 only
3) Savings accounts: Less than 5 accounts
4) Insurance: 1 x Life & CI insurance, 1 x Medical Card
5) Investments: Less than 5 types
6) Foreign Currencies (Cash): Exchange all of them to Ringgit, if possible
Simplifying our finance not only reduce our mental burden from being overwhelmed, it is also time-saving.
Some may say we cannot maximize our profits with this method. But I don’t see it that way.
The time you free up from managing money is worth more than a few bucks that you are able to squeeze out from multiple money tools.
So if you asked me, I rather have less stress & more time than having few extra Ringgit.
Talk with you again next week.
Your Money Buddy,
Marcus
If you’re interested to know what financial tools I use, here are one of them that I use most of the time:
→ Versa – Where I invest my emergency fund for up to 4.0% return. Get free RM10 if you register a new account with my referral code “AL9JZJ9H”