How to manage your money?
True financial literacy revolves around five pillars: saving, budgeting, managing credit, managing debt, and investing. Let’s explore each topic in more detail to better understand the basics of teaching financial literacy.
Part 1: know your goal - STAR Dream
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S - Specify your goal, list down atleast 3 goals
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T - "Time" when can you achieve this goal
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A - "achieve" how can you achieve this goal
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R - "relevant" is this goal worth achieving
Part 2: know your "needs" and your "wants"
​Record your spendings to categorize it into needs and wants.
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Need - something you need to live and function
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Want - something which is nice to have but not essential.
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​The aim of this spending exercise is to prioritize on essential needs first and spend based on what we can afford.
Part 3: Budget to set your monthly savings goal
A budget is a spending plan that will help you track how much money you receive and how much money you can spend each month.
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Income: Monthly salary​
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Remittance: Amount you need to send back home
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Monthly saving goal: how much you need to save to reach your goal
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Balance for spending: the amount left over after setting aside savings and remittance
Part 4: Protection
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Try and build an emergency savings fund to protect yourself and family incase of emergencies.
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This should be equivalent to 3 to 6 months of monthly income to give you some room incase of unexpected events.
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Having sufficient savigns will help you avoid borrowing from others, money lenders and other scams.
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Be wise, save now.
Part 5: Investment
Request your employer to help you open a bank account to deposit your monthly salary.
Various banks like Hang Seng bank, BOC HK bank have salary accounts with low minimum balance for domestic helpers.
Benefits of opening a salary account in HK includes
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Tracking your salary records in one place.
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Ability to remit money digitally online
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Track your spending and withdraw cash only as per needed
Want to talk to us. We are eagerly waiting to hear from you.