At one point, I was diligent about counting daily expenses and organizing everything so I could see where I spent too much and where I could cut.

Then I realized: tracking where money goes doesn’t fix how much comes in. So I dropped the habit for months.

Don’t get me wrong, counting daily expenses is still a good discipline exercise. But after letting things run wild for a while, I felt the need to do a proper audit. And to help Future Me remember, I’m putting real-ish numbers here.

The problem with tracking expenses is it’s easy to get lost in the noise. So I made a simple framework to bucket everything. I call it FLOW.

The FLOW Framework

I group my expenses into four buckets:

  1. Fixed: subscriptions, memberships
  2. Living: daily necessities, rent, food, transport, bills
  3. Others: family support, gifts, charity, anything else
  4. Wealth: investing, saving, skill acquisition

All numbers below are monthly estimates.

Fixed: $182-202

  • Cloud servers: $30
  • AI subs (Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT): $80
  • Pay-as-you-go AI: $20-40
  • Notion: $10
  • Cloud storage: $10
  • Monthly games membership: $20
  • Insurance: $10
  • Spotify: $2 (not that $2 is gonna do anything lol)

Living: $280

  • Rent: $50
  • Daily necessities: $30
  • Food: $100
  • Bills: $50
  • Transport: $50

Others: $100-300

Hypothetically (for obvious reasons), this sits loosely in that range.

Wealth: $300

This one’s hard to count because I’ve switched to a “pay myself first” habit. Income goes here first instead of whatever’s leftover.

I don’t mentally treat this as spending. It’s allocation I’d rather not touch.

Total Outflow

Counting Fixed + Living + Others as money actually leaving:

$562-782 per month.

Which is wild because in my head I thought I was doing “modestly” at around $300/month. It literally doubled. lmao.

Now, What?

Counting doesn’t magically fix anything. But it stops you from lying to yourself. Annie Duke calls this “resulting” in Thinking in Bets: we judge decisions by outcomes and forget the actual inputs. I thought I was spending $300/month. I wasn’t even close. The audit didn’t change my spending, but it killed the delusion.

Of course, raw numbers don’t mean much without context.

I asked the boys about their monthly expenses too. Answers ranged from $200-800. The spread sounds wide, but it’s almost entirely explained by two variables: where they live and how many people they support.

A Few Things I Learned

Pareto shows up in spending too. A small set of things drives most of the burn. Living alone is 45% of my outflow. Fixed is another 31%. Those two explain most of it.

Location and dependents create huge skew. Bigger city, more people to support, expenses scale linearly.

Some people can yolo and be fine, as long as their safety net is real: insurance, emergency fund, stable-ish income.

Transportation eats more than you think, especially owning a car once you count maintenance, insurance, gas, depreciation, and repairs. For me, Grab/Gojek still wins economically and logistically.

What I Can Actually Slash (Now)

Living, Others, Wealth… I don’t want to touch those for now.

But Fixed is the obvious target:

  • Keep Claude (main vibe-coding partner)
  • Keep ChatGPT (heavy work usage)
  • Cut anything redundant
  • Most importantly: no pay-as-you-go creep

I’m just trying to stop the silent leaks, that’s all.

Ending

This post is an audit. And like any audit, it’s a snapshot, not a solution. The value isn’t in the numbers themselves. It’s in killing the gap between what I think I spend and what I actually spend.

I’ll keep doing these FLOW check-ins once in a while. Especially watching the fixed stuff. These are small enough to ignore, but big enough to compound.

But outflow optimization only gets you so far. Cutting $50 here and there is fine, but the actual game is on the other side of the equation…

…which is the inflow.

Yeah. That’s still where the real leverage is.