Thursday, May 09, 2013

The Value of Money

... Is going down the drains. Seriously.

Yesterday I thought of baking home-made chocolate chip cookies using a recipe that I found online. So after fetching Khayla from her school, I drove to a baking supplies shop nearby Giant Batu Caves.

These are some of the stuffs I picked - self-raising flour, brown sugar, chocolate chips, butter, sugar sprinkles (so we could have more fun baking the cookies), a packet of Oreo cookies which Khayla asked for, and cake mix (I was thinking of baking red velvet cupcakes as well) that costed me RM7.50 a packet. 

When I brought those stuffs to the counter, the girl who minded the store calculated everything and told me that the total price was RM44. Naturally, I was shocked! It wasn't that many items and only to bake one type of cookies, and I spent almost RM50. 

At first I thought she had done something wrong like scanning a few items twice. When I reached home and checked the receipt, I noted that everything was in order. Apparently home-made cookies cost more to bake nowadays, it's cheaper to buy them from stores (the Oreo cookies are just RM3.50).

Then this afternoon, I noted that I've run out of cooking oil, milk and eggs. Again, I went to the nearest grocery store to get these staples and also a few other groceries namely: 

1. 1 liter Ribena drink

2. 1 liter mineral water

3. A carton of juice

4. A carton of ready-to-drink green tea 

5. 350ml bottle of Coke. 

6. Milk (I chose the lower price between two familiar brands)

7. Cooking oil

The checkout counter told me that everything was RM37. Again, it reminds me of how little the value of money nowadays.

I remember when I was small, we could buy nasi lemak for 50 sen (complete with fried anchovies and half a boiled egg) or even 30 sen (the kind of nasi lemak sold in small plastic packets complete with sambal, a quarter of a boiled egg, and a slice of cucumber, and you meshed it together and ate it right from the packet). And with RM1, you can get 3 pieces of roti canai.

Now a standard nasi lemak (no chicken or whatsoever) will set you back by at least RM2. And 1 piece of roti canai is the same price of 3 pieces of roti canai back in the early 90s.

So basically a budget of RM500 per month for groceries at present time is a very skimpy budget. There's very few things that those RM500 is going to get you. Maybe if you consistently ate rice with eggs and dried or salted fish,  this amount can last you that long, no problem.

I can't figure out how some people can be super-rich and spend their time shopping for the latest clothes, shoes, makeup and handbags while just living off their husband's income. Their biggest worry is probably which smartphones to choose or which place to go for vacation.

Here we are on the other side of the world worrying about how to stretch the value of money so that we can last till the end of the month comfortably. 

I can't imagine how it is for families earning lesser income than ours and with a lot more children than we have. God bless them. No wonder people are mostly unhappy nowadays.