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, where 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.

Raw numbers don’t mean much without context though. 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 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 buckets explain almost everything.

I asked around and location and dependents are basically the whole story. Bigger city, more people to support, it just scales linearly. Not surprising, but seeing it in actual numbers makes it real.

Some people can yolo their spending and be totally fine, as long as their safety net is real. Insurance, emergency fund, stable-ish income. If those are solid, the day-to-day stuff doesn’t matter as much.

And transportation eats way more than you’d think, especially if you own a car. Maintenance, insurance, gas, depreciation, repairs… it adds up fast. For me, Grab/Gojek still wins both economically and logistically.

What I can actually slash (for 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.

This whole thing is a snapshot, not a solution. But it killed the gap between what I thought I was spending and what I was actually spending, and that alone was worth doing.

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