As promised, 10 readers who filled out my Personal Spending Audit Challenge survey received their ?200 Grab Food vouchers on Friday morning, and while it warms my heart to be able to give away a tasty treat, it meant so much more to me to have over 300 people taking part in this personal finance challenge. I said that I’d give the results of the survey, so let’s go question by question and talk about it!
How are you tracking your spending?
The majority of MB readers are using spreadsheets (52.9%), with almost 19% of people opting for my free Google Sheets template to get started. That’s great! As a person who lives in spreadsheets and loves the control that a spreadsheet provides, this result makes sense to me coming from an audience of people interested in investing. Almost 29% of readers said they were using a “budgeting app”, which is great, too. I was surprised to see my other preferred method, “Notes app on phone”, get only 4.3%.
What has been the hardest part of the challenge (so far)?
Starting this challenge in mid-January was sub-optimal, and the 37% of readers who said that “backfilling missed days accurately” was the hardest part of the challenge is probably a consequence of that late start. Based on the feedback from people in my orbit (and from my own struggles to get readable statements from BPI for my credit card), I figured this would just have to be something that we powered through together to start this challenge in the first month of the year. The second-biggest challenge, “Remembering to track purchases” (31%), would probably have been the biggest challenge if I had thought to talk about this project before New Year’s and we all started together on January 1. Thankfully, only 4% of readers said that “Setting up the tracker” was the hardest part. I hope that having the easy option of my free template to get started helped keep this number so low.
What are you most interested in learning about?
Unsurprisingly for an investing-focused newsletter, “Investing my savings” was the topic that received the most votes (36%), with “Increasing my income” coming in a somewhat distant second (27%). Only 16% were interested to learn more about “Budgeting to save more money”, and slightly less were interested in learning about “Building an emergency fund”. Still, I think we are headed in the right direction with this content to supplement the PSE-related stuff, since only 3% of readers responded that “Personal finance doesn’t interest me.”
What types of investments do you already own?
This was a question that allowed multiple selections, so a pie chart doesn’t really work as well. The most popular investment was stocks (96%), which is also unsurprising for a PSE-centric mailing list, followed by mutual funds (50%) and time deposits (48%). Crypto was owned by 37% of respondents, and bonds owned by just 25%.
MB BOTTOM-LINE: This was more about getting people to participate in the project for the insights that will come later than it was about anything else, and from that perspective: wild success! Thank you to everyone who has started tracking expenses, who has responded to the survey, and who has talked to friends and family about doing the challenge together. At the end of this month I’m going to put out another survey, with even more giveaways, to see what sorts of insights have been made, and then to take the next step with what we’ve learned to further build our financial foundation (or test it if we’re already living on top of it). Keep tracking! Be accurate, but be reasonable. Don’t get lost in perfection. Only 10 more days!