My March Highlight: Here’s How I Spent My Tax Refund

It’s a new month, so here come the highlights of my last month!

MAIN HIGHLIGHT

I know the main theme of my blog here in Figuringgitout is about ringgit, money, and personal finance, but it feels incomplete to update about my personal finance without also updating about my personal life. Because both are intricately linked. From my experience, my physical, mental and emotional states somehow affect my financial life, and vice versa.

Back in 2019 and before when I was very financially unstable and constantly making stupid money mistakes, it surely affected my mental and emotional states. In 2020 when I started to work through my financial life, my mental and emotional states slowly improved.

Read more:

• My Relationship with Money: A Year Ago vs Now
• Time to Reset and Prepare for the New Year and Why It’s Important
• The Final Update of My No Buy Year & My Spending Review of 2020

And now it’s the other way round – and it’s equally challenging.

My physical, mental and emotional states are not at their 100%. Well, work-related stress. And it ain’t fun because all parts of my life got affected. Including my financial life – I accidentally missed tracking my finances here and there, I can’t keep track with the personal finance world, comments here and in Figuringgitout’s Facebook page go unreplied for days, I fall back in learning and trading, my side hustle project got abandoned, and all these contribute to more stress. Ishhh, vicious cycle.

And why am I telling you this? More as a reminder to myself that it’s okay to not have everything figured out. That I can’t control everything in life. That it’s okay if I can’t do it all. That it’s okay to take it slow, one thing at a time. What important is I keep going, at my own pace.

That’s that, just want to be candid.

SPENDING HIGHLIGHTS

I don’t feel the need of sharing my whole spending review because other than those highlighted below, it’s pretty much the same every month. My income goes to savings, family, rent and bills, food, groceries, transportation, my minimal social life etc. But do let me know if you want to know the whole deal okay.

Anyway, here are my spending highlights for March 2021.

1. Paid 3 speeding fines for RM310

Yes, I already paid for 7 speeding fines in the past 3 years and I’m not proud of that. I never got fined for anything else but that. I pinky promise I won’t be caught speeding again. And yes, I don’t intend to tell my parents about that.

‘Take it slow’ seems to be my new life mantra.

2. Went thrifting after over a year – spent RM213

After not spending for a year, it was such a huge fun going to the thrift stores aka bundles, and sifting through clothes and bags looking for gems! Oh Lord, I forgot how good it feels and now it’s even better because I wasn’t accompanied with the guilty feelings of overspending on things I don’t need. Technically, I still don’t need more clothes but – you know what I mean. I deserve this.

By the way, I didn’t spend RM213 at one go, it was an accumulation of a few short thrifting trips (admittedly because I needed to channel my stress somewhere else, which supports my point that emotional state goes together with financial state haha). You can also take this as me trying to justify those spending, but I got at least 20 items out of those RM213 which was insane. Won’t get the same if I buy new at the shopping complex.

3. Paid RM535 for hair treatment

As a way to deal with my inability to control many fallings in life, I’m trying to at least take control of my hair fall. So I paid RM535 for 5 sessions of hair treatments which may or may not help with the issue. I’ll update in you in months’ time.

And this is also one of the ways I deal with life stress. I go get myself pampered.

4. Received tax refund of RM1,113

Got extra RM1,113 by the end of March from the tax refund but hahahahaha RM1,058 already went to the 3 things above hahahaha. So that’s how I spent my tax refund this year.

At least I submitted my tax way early without any hiccup. Let’s take that as a win.

ALL IN ALL

I will continue dealing with this emotional and mental turmoil of mine while still keeping my finances in check. And hope you’re doing well with both.

Let’s continue figuringgitout.