Life is all about spending. Either making big purchases or small, we usually think very carefully because it will affect our cash flow. One of the ways to do that is doing an item calculator. This helps motivate us to think about saving. So, how to start?

First, separate between your daily and occasional purchases. For everyday necessities you get from stores, you can become a member or join loyalty programs. For example, earn points when you buy your branded coffee every morning and earn points to exchange for free drinks or gifts. So, if a cup of coffee costs $3, you can save at least $0.32 per cup.

You can use apps or online to calculate your expenses. Though it’s not practical, you may also calculate your expenses manually by keeping the invoices and sum up all the bills you for the day. The downside of this technique is, you might lose track of the items or bills that do not have physical receipt such as Grab and small shops.

What if our expenses are already summed up monthly like utilities? You can still calculate it daily. Let’s look at our electricity use. Recharging the phone multiple times a day is a must. To see how much you spend each charging cycle, you need to count the times you fully charge and the capacity your battery holds. To make this easy, we can consider that we charge the battery twice a day and our phone battery has a capacity of 2,800 mAh. To charge this, you need 10.78 watts of power and more than 3 hours. If you multiply the power and the time you need, you will see that you use 0.07546 kilowatts of electricity. Compare it to the price of electricity in Phnom Penh, you will be spending ¢1.35 per day on phone charging. You can calculate the price of all your devices using this method. There are websites that will easily calculate this for you too!

How much do you really spend each day? Give these item calculators a go and see if you can reduce your daily spending.