Dirty Dinar

As some of you may have noticed my Emergency Fund amount has increased from KWD 668 to 968. I’ve put aside 300 from my January salary towards my savings, which has me 32.3% closer to my goal.

I was originally supposed to set aside 500 from my salary but I decided on a surprise splurge, my hair treatments. They’re going to cost me 200 so I deducted the amount from my Emergency Fund money. If I continue to save up 500 a month until May, I’ll reach my goal in time so I’m not too worried.

With the return of the money I had lent out, my Emergency Fund had more at the end of January than I expected. My goal was to have KWD 500 and I ended with KWD 968. It’s not a bad start to the year.

I’m excited that people are beginning to leave comments on my blog! I found two fantastic aggregators. One is the Personal Finance Aggregator and the other is the Kuwait Blogs Aggregator. I have been trying to follow blogs in both aggregators and leaving comments whenever I can. Now people are beginning to share their advice with me and it’s a wonderful feeling!

Bader left me a comment on my Monitoring my Progress post saying,

Hope you reach your goals even sooner, I have a system I’ve been using for a while now, each salary I get, I divide it as follows, 40% of it goes to my savings, 30% is divided up into a daily allowance, and the other 30% is used for bills and anything I plan to buy like cloths, a cell phone i’ve wanted, etc. Now, lets say that my daily allowance is for example 20kd, its not everyday that someone would spend 20 kd, sometimes more and sometimes less, it realy depends on what day it is. If you spend less than your allowance on any given day, you add that to your next days allowance, so if you spent 10kd today, tomorrow you would have 30kd and so on,because on work days, you might not spend much but on your off days you may spend way over your daily allowance but you have the remaining allowance from days that you didnt finish your allowance. Sorry for writing so much, Im really bad at explaining things Also setting goals, like ur doing, is also necessary. Hope this helps. All in all, I wish you the very best.

I love reading on how people budget and try to pay off their debt or increase their savings. Thank you, Bader, for your input.

I decided to take Bader’s budget and apply it to my own total pay of KWD 1163. The current budget I have for myself is to limit myself by spending only 663 per month. I will try to deal with cash only by withdrawing 100 at the beginning of every week and leaving 163 in my account for emergencies or extra expenditures (birthdays, etc.). The remaining 500 from my salary will go towards my savings.

The table below demonstrates my money breakdown according to Bader’s 40-30-30 % rule and my own budget.

As you can see from the table, we nearly have the same percentages allocated to Savings, Daily Allowances and Miscellaneous expenses. The one that is drastically different is the miscellaneous category. Bader budgets 30% of his salary on bills and purchases. I choose to keep mine on emergency standby in case I have obligations during the week like birthdays or surprise expenses.

Now I’m curious about how others out there save their money. Do you deduct a specific amount or a percentage of your salary?

I’ve added some progress bars to the left to track how I’m doing when it comes to my saving goals. Each bar will constitute the percentage of how much I’ve accumulated and how close I am to reaching my goals.

My first priority is to have a minimum of KWD 3,000 in an Emergency Fund. Yesterday, my friend deposited the 1,000 she owed me into my account and I used the extra funds to pay off my credit card expenses. I put aside 668 towards my Emergency Fund which comes out to be 22.3% of my target. If I stick to my budget I’ll be able to reach my goal by the end of May, a month earlier than I’d anticipated.

My second goal is to save up enough to start investing in the Kuwait Stock Exchange. In the meantime I will have to educate myself or attend seminars on how to invest because I don’t know the first thing about it.

I’m excited about the progress bars because I think they’ll have me stay focused on achieving my saving goals! It’s a stroke of luck that got me to reach 22% so soon!