What People Misunderstood About My Combo Savings Strategy

Publish date: Sun, 14 Oct 2018, 08:57 PM

When my recent article got published on Yahoo Money Matters (Link Here if you are interested), there were many attacks remarks on the comments section and also on the social media and hardwarezone forum in particular to the way I save on things.

They think that by being able to get to where I am today, I must have scrimped on things so badly in order to amass such a high percentage of savings even though I am the sole breadwinner of the family and our family have two young children.

At least 50% of the crowd thinks the maths doesn't add up, or they must think I live a misery life that I am missing out on most of the "fun" things in life.

The other 50% of the crowd thinks I must have a high income equivalent to a scholar working for the government.

Everywhere on the comments was an assault.

Almost none was complimentary or at least try to believe that it is true.

That is where I know that we here in the financial blogosphere are the minority outlier who believes things can happen for a reason.

There are many people who I felt had misunderstood when I say that we have to be aware on the things that we buy in order to accumulate more savings at our end.

Savers folks like us do not scrimp on non-discretionary items that we have to spend on.

We spend by being smart about buying them and looking for every value that we can buy.

For instance, I have two young kids at home who obviously need the most important things in their lives right now - Diapers and Milk Powders.

That doesn't mean we do away without them by depriving them of these things but rather we try to source for these items that have the same quality yet cheaper alternative.

In my earlier years for instance, I would buy them over at our neighbourhood country whenever we visited JB on the weekends when we had our short trip travel. With a strong SGD equivalent when converted to Ringgit, the price that we pay for these items would have halved the amount that we pay in Singapore for the same imported items.

We did the same whenever we had the chance for our frequent travel to Bangkok.

Over the past few months where we did not travel anywhere, we would purchase them through Redmart, an online grocery shopping portal which takes the inconvenience out of the way for us for bulky items like rice, oil, tissue roll paper, diapers, etc.

To add spice to the convenience deal, we also sprung up a few combo savings strategy which resulted in very decent savings at the end of the day.

1.) The first is through logging in to Shopback, a great e-commerce online shopping platform that partners with so many merchants that you literally have to use them.

p.s: if you are a first time user, you can sign up using the link here and immediately redeem yourself a $5 reward start.

$230.89 - That is the amount of cash rebates I get in recent months through my routine mandatory item purchases

2.) Once I logged into my Shopback, I will activate the rebate to get into Redmart and does my routine shopping option.

I usually choose bulky items such as rice (they have a great japanese rice at affordable price which I highly recommend), oil and diapers which I am too lazy to carry outside since we are car-less people.

Redmart often has a promo-tie with Citibank credit card which you are entitled to around 8.8% off your spend ($12 off with minimum $135 spend). Again, I buy mostly items that can last a few months ahead so I just store and add them up accordingly.

CITIUP12 - My favorite code

3.) In addition to the above, by being smart about using the right credit card and in the above case Citibank card, I'll get an additional 8% cashback that goes back into my citicard (see tie-up link above).

4.) Last but not least, Redmart also has a partnership tie-up with Live-Up where it gives you further perks benefits by just signing up an account with them. They currently have a free 60 days trial with a free 2 months Netflix if you sign up an account with them, after which you'd be charged $28.80/year.

But just look at the savings I have over the past month with them, it's easily over $50 and I have redeemed my initial charges with them.

My Combo Savings Strategy

My final purchase would look something like this:

I purchased something that's worth around $135 (you will get around the same amount if you purchase them at your usual grocery stores) and get the below combo savings deducted:

$135 x [1% (through Shopback for existing Redmart customer) + 8.8% (Citi promo tie-up on almost every Cyber-Tuesday) + 8% (additional Citi cashback reward) + 5% (Live-up) = $30.78

This translates to a savings of about 22.8% for almost every time I purchased via Redmart over the past few months.

My Combo Savings Strategy

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, savings is about being smart about buying things.

The first being able whether to segregate between discretionary vs non-discretionary items.

And the second to the extent of being able to extract the most value out of the things that you buy.

That's how I get my relatively high savings rate even until today, we save what we need to save and not what most people misunderstood by being stingy on things.

I hope that gives some clarification about things.

Thanks for reading.

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Discussions

Be the first to like this. Showing 1 of 1 comments

calvintaneng

Good sharing.

A DOLLAR SAVED IS BETTER THAN A DOLLAR EARNED

A DOLLAR SAVED IS WORTH AT LEAST $1.30

Saving from

1. Taxes. 20% or more
2. From trouble of earning it.
3. From paying extra as Christians pay 10% tithes and Muslims pay 5% zakat
So a Dollar saved is better than a Dollar earned.

Great guys like Warren Buffet won't spend more than US$5 for breakfast by eating burgers. He also buy and drove a 2nd hand car.

Ikea Boss Igvar Kamprad took bus to work, eat at Ikea canteen and buy only 2nd hand clothes

Yet both are in top 10 billionaires

So learn to save and invest early. Compounding interest is the 8th wonder in the world

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/30/warren-buffetts-breakfast-never-costs-more-than-317.html

https://www.thelocal.se/20160309/ikea-founder-buys-all-his-clothes-at-flea-markets

2018-10-14 22:52

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