As I mentioned many times, due to my freegan activities, my daily grocery bill has dropped to almost zero. Along with my free vouchers from my wife's AIA Vitality app.
Furthermore, due to a change in weekend schedule, we go out to eat less.
We used to go out on Saturdays and visit parents on Sundays. However our parent visits have been changed to Saturday. BUT, we don't really have mood to go out on Sundays cos we just want to rest a little at home. So as a result, even Sunday meals are free cos I cook.
This has caused a large drop in our discretionary spending.
To hit my monthly combined spending of $1,000 each month, I haven taken to prepaying many of our utility bills.
SP Services = $160 prepaid, they didn't allow me to pay anymore than this amount.
M1 = $87 prepaid. This is 3 months of home internet.
Starhub = $400 prepaid. This is 5 months of my wife's handphone bills + her family's broadband & cable.
Total prepaid for this month = $647.
Not to mention that I ALREADY have a credit balance with Starhub ($90) and SP Services ($53) even before this month, which have not been used up yet.
So, yes, my M1 bill has been prepaid for the next 3 months, utilities 3 months, wife's Starhub 6 months.
I did make a mistake though. I was in Malaysia earlier this month and I did not charge MYR300 to my card. So I could have spent an additional S$100 which would have made things slightly easier.
I wonder if I will be able to maintain this level of spending for the rest of this year.
Even though I might be able to keep discretionary spending low, I will need to find another way to handle months which may have a spike in spending, like dental treatments or replacement of certain items.
Cos the UOB One card requires me to consistently spend S$500 per month to get rebates, but I won't be spending S$500 per month anymore, so I'll need to find another card which will give me rebates for months when my expense spikes.
I have another thought though.
UOB give bonus interest of $100 per month (assuming S$50,000 bank balance), plus $50 rebate every 3 months.
This ends up to around $1200 + $200 = $1400, IF the customer spends $6000 per year and sets up 3 GIRO transactions from the UOB bank account.
This is around 23% "rebate" for spending $6000 every year.
If we reduce our monthly expense to $500 on my wife's card, then I will not be able to "earn" this $1400.
Soooo, my thought is this... for the months that I am not able to hit $500 spending, I COULD top up the spending by buying NTUC vouchers. Now of course I have problems using vouchers.
But what if I sold the vouchers instead? I could sell NTUC vouchers at a 10% discount and I would still be able to obtain a net surplus.
So I could buy $6000 worth of vouchers in a year, sell at 10% discount, so I get back $5400 in cash by selling the vouchers at a loss, but I still get $1400 worth of rebates back from UOB. Means I get $6800 back. Resulting in a net profit of $800 per year.
I'm thinking if I should be doing this... So I just use my card like normal and still try to hit $500 on both our cards as per normal. If I have any shortfall, I just buy vouchers and sell them at 10% discount.
This way, for months that I have spikes in spending, like buying some replacement items, I can still use the UOB card and retain all my monthly rebates.
Now... the only problem is to find someone who will regularly buy my vouchers. Cos I think it's really tedious to post on Carousell monthly and meeting with different people every month.
If I can get regular operations out, I think this would be a great idea, maybe one of my neighbours or something...
An interesting thought, but let's see how next month works out...
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