FIRE Trial Expense Report — June 2026: Is Singapore Really That Expensive?

May survived a $1,200 hosting bill and still finished green. June’s largest expense was bigger still, and the month came in cheaper anyway. Six months into tracking this, that has stopped feeling like luck.

For those new here, my wife and I are your average Singaporean couple living in an HDB flat in Singapore. Our monthly mortgage is fully paid through CPF, so housing doesn’t show up in these numbers. I’ve been tracking every dollar we spend since 2013 using You Need A Budget (YNAB). Each month, I set our real expenses against my alternative income and answer one question.

Can we sustain our lifestyle without a full-time salary?

This month’s story? The month’s biggest expense turned out to be mostly timing, the total still came in low, and six months of data finally lets me answer a question bigger than any single month: is Singapore actually expensive?

Average monthly numbers for June 2026, on a trailing 12-month basis

• Total expenses → $3,251
• Alternative income → $5,040
• Net surplus → $1,788

Jun 2026 Headline: Our Biggest Expense Wasn’t Really An Expense

June’s biggest expense item was the Family bucket, $1,131 against a $729 average, the largest anomaly of the month. Most of it wasn’t fresh spending. A round of CDC vouchers came out early and I front-loaded it for our parents, which parks a cost in June that would otherwise have trickled through later months. More on that below.

Key takeaway about big one-off items

A single category doubling is not the same as a month blowing out. Most of June’s heaviest bucket was a bill arriving early, but the total still came in low.

Total Expenses: Where The Money Went

1. Regular Bills ($441)

This is the monthly fixed expenses, and June ran 7% above average.

Utilities, insurance, subscriptions, internet, telco: $441 (vs avg $414)

A normal fixed month, a touch over average, and the overshoot is the utilities. Tuas Power came in at $113 and Town Council at $69, both running heavier than usual after a stretch of low-reading months at home. Insurance across the three policies came to its usual ~$130, the subscriptions (Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, iCloud) ran their regular ~$71, StarHub fibre at a low $22 this month, two telco plans at $15 in total, and my World Vision kid at $23.

2. Living Costs ($739)

This is the monthly variable expenses, and June ran 4% under average. A steady month at home, with the small twist sitting in transport rather than food.

Food & Home: $598 (vs avg $656)

This covers everything home-related for two people: groceries, home supplies, eating out, hawker meals, food delivery. Under average, and intermittent fasting keeps doing the quiet work in the background: two meals a day means fewer receipts before we even try. A $100 Food Panda credits top-up via HeyMax vouchers did some of the damage, a $49 Lazada home haul (a 7-pack Bialetti Nespresso pods and household supplies) padded it out, and the rest was the usual NTUC or Sheng Siong runs, and Kopitiam visits.

Transport: $141 (vs avg $117)

Both of us work from home, so transport is usually a quiet category. June ran 21% over due to a few more private-hire rides than a normal month as we shuttled around for family errands. Still $141 for a month of getting around two people, which I’ll take.

3. The Rest ($1,392)

Everything else that is irregular lands here, which is exactly why no single month of it means much on its own. $1,392 this month against $2,064 on average, and for once the movement is downward despite one loud sub-bucket inside. Six fixed sub-buckets sit in here every month:

• Annual Expenses
• Personal
• Family
• Travel
• Side Hustle
• Miscellaneous

Annual Expense: $0 (vs avg $130)

Nothing this month.

Personal: $15 (vs avg $255)

Nearly empty. Another order from Uniqlo, and that was all of it. The $255 average is old, big-ticket buys spread across the year, with no fresh spending joining them this month.

Family: $1,131 (vs avg $729)

The story of the month at bucket level, and mostly a timing story rather than a spending one. Strip out the CDC voucher front-load (the box below) and what’s left is ordinary: meals and time with the parents, a Din Tai Fung lunch among them. I won’t itemise the bucket. The shape matters more than the receipts, and the shape is simple. When the folks need looking after, we’re in a position to do it without checking the balance first. That readiness is one of the quieter things this whole FIRE structure buys.

Travel: $279 (vs avg $730)

Well under average, because June was a planning month rather than a travelling one. What landed was the prep for a July Genting trip with the in-laws: S$100 worth of Malaysian Ringgit changed at the money changer, a one-night $75 Airbnb stay, and $27 of travel insurance for the folks. A couple of meals at new eateries which we clocked under “domestic travel” filled in the rest. Again, the same geo-arbitrage thread that runs through this whole series, just paid a month ahead of the fun in July.

Side Hustle: $10 (vs avg $218)

Almost nothing, paid for $10 of credits from tinkering with AI tools. DeepSeek v4 Pro, in case you’re wondering. A near-zero month here means no renewals came due, not that all my tools were free.

Miscellaneous: -$42 (vs avg $1)

A $42 credit this month rather than a spend. It’s the buffer fund, where I square up minor budgeting mismatches, and this month a few reconciliation entries happened to land on the plus side and trim the total. Next month it could just as easily go the other way.

Alternative Income: Where The Money Came From

Alternative income totalled $3,316 in June versus the 12-month average at $5,040.

Jun 2026 FIRE Status

June closed at a $744 surplus. Green, though the slimmest of the year so far, and not because the month was expensive. A family-heavy month still came in nearly $680 under the expense average. The surplus is thin only because the income side was between dividend clusters this month.

Annual Tracker (2026)

Six rows in, and the table is the argument by now. A fat green, a red, a quiet green, a family-heavy green, a hosting-bill green, and now a thin green where the biggest expense was mostly timing. Five of six positive, and the average of all six sits comfortably in surplus. No single row is representative. That’s the whole point of watching the average instead of reacting to any one month.

Behind The Numbers

Six months in, the table also gives perspective to a question people love to argue about: is Singapore expensive?

• For two people living a life we’re more than comfortable with, spending has averaged about $3,100 a month across the half-year.
• Travel is the big swinger, a near-empty $37 in March, a whole month in Thailand back in January, so take it out and the average drops to around $2,200.
• Strip it down to only monthly bills and expenses for a two-person setup, and a “bare-bones” month runs closer to $1,200.

The gap between those numbers is travel, family, and the irregular once (or twice) per year items, not our day to day. Housing sits outside all of it (the mortgage runs entirely through CPF) and we have no kids, so it’s our number, not a benchmark for yours. But it’s real, tracked to the dollar, not an estimation.

Whatever the headlines say, this is what our version of comfortable reality costs.

If you’re interested in how I track all of this, I’ve been using You Need A Budget (YNAB) since 2013. It’s the source of every number in this post. I also wrote about how it all started with a simple zero-based budget if you’re curious about the philosophy behind it.

My downloaded YNAB data syncs with a dashboard I built, with 1-click buttons that generate these monthly reports. It takes the hassle out of checking and matching the data. Now all I have to do is write the post. All thanks to AI for helping me build a suite of personal finance tools, and, going by the Side Hustle bucket, for billing me for the privilege.

From where it stands now, July is already shaping up busier. The Genting trip with the in-laws lands mid-month, so Travel will swing back up and the prep money we paid in June finally meets the rest of the bill. School holidays are finally over, which means we will go out more. In addition, dividend income (Syfe REIT+) should give the month a boost. After a thin-but-green June, I wouldn’t mind July landing a surplus for yet another month.

See you next month!

A quick note on the numbers. Figures in the writing are rounded to whole dollars for easy reading, while the tables keep the exact cents. Each bucket’s 12-month average is rounded on its own, so once in a while the rounded parts sum to a cent off the total, and the June average column does, by three cents. It’s a rounding quirk, not a missing dollar.

Kevin

Kevin started Turtle Investor after hitting rock bottom at negative $25,755 net worth. Today, his monthly alternative income pays for all his daily expenses. He shares what actually works (and what doesn’t) for Singaporeans building wealth. Learn more about Kevin here.