So what in the actual blazes am I writing all this for? I meant to create a sort of guide on how to fangirl responsibly as an adult. Which mainly revolves around spending wisely. So in order to be able to do the stuff I like as a fan, I would need to set aside money for actual life expenses, and then set aside another portion for fangirl expenses. To help me save and spend, I made a point to open accounts in multiple banks. One main bank, where my salary gets banked in, and another bank, Bank 2, purely for savings. I chose a bank with few branches and few atms as my Bank 2, so that I won’t be inclined to withdraw cash and spend from that savings account. I set my debit card limit to the lowest amount possible so that I won’t paywave everything from that account, too. If possible, I transfer 200-500 a month into my savings account in Bank 2. Bank 2 is my rainy day savings account. 

In my Main Bank, I opened 2 accounts, one savings and one checking. My salary gets banked into the savings account. I use the checking account as my expense account. So every month, I calculate all my bills, and transfer that amount into my checking account from my savings account to pay for my bills. If there are extra expenses that I need to account for that month, then this gets transferred to my expense account also. I try to make it a point to spend only the allocated amount in my expense account. This is how I budget my monthly expenses. Most of my bills get paid via direct debit from my checking account on the 1st of every month. So usually I just transfer 1 big sum and then the bank does the rest. 

So what about those fangirling expenses? Most of the time I charge the really costly ones to my credit card. And if my credit card company is able to split the payment into installments, then I take that up. But usually, the bank doesn’t offer installments, so then I create my own monthly amortization schedule. I have my own rules on how much to allocate per month to repay my credit card. Usually it’s:

1. anything below 100 gets paid in full the same or next month 
2. anything between 100 – 500 is split into 2-4 monthly repayments
3. anything between 500 – 1000 is split into 6 monthly repayments
4. anything above 1000 is split into 12 or more monthly repayments

So for example, say I travelled abroad in Jan to attend a concert and attend a second concert locally in April in the same year, I would try to split the repayments like this:

I would bank in that underlined Total amount into my expense account too, and use that amount to pay my credit card. Of course, the credit card statement will have a minimum payment amount, but usually that Total amount in my amortization schedule is larger than the minium payment, so we’re okay. I will add new lines for every big fan-related expense incurred to my existing schedule. The schedule above is a very simple one to show how it would look in one year, but the one I actually have spans about 2 years.  

What actually made me want to “retire” from fangirling was that my amortization schedule got too big. The Total payment amount at the bottom of each month got so huge that I had to stop spending so that I could repay everything. There was a time when I went to 3-4 concert trips per year, and that was just nuts. Plus all the albums and merch I bought, all that overseas shipping incurred just made it bigger. It just had to stop so that I could manage better. And be a responsible adult. 

Being in a kpop fandom is like a competition. What non-fans don’t get is that we’re in it not to get our bias’s attention; no, we do it to compete with other fandoms. Getting your group to no.1 on the chart and getting them to stay at no.1 for the entire promotional period is the goal. If your fandom is huge, then you won’t have any problems achieving it. But if your fandom is small or medium sized, then you’ve got to put in a lot more money and effort to get the job done. It’s all about fandom pride. 

It’s not unusual to have people save up many months before comeback just so they can buy albums in bulk and multiple streaming passes. That’s just the norm. But what I learned from having an amortization schedule like the one above is that seeing the cost tabulated helps me to estimate for future comebacks. If you’ve only got one main fandom, then doing this is easy. If you take my schedule as an example, then you could see that roughly, I’d need to save up about MYR 200-450 a month in one year to fund my fangirl expenses for the next year. 

That should be the plan, but I haven’t got that far yet. I’m still trying to clear off all my past year’s debts before I can proceed to save for next year’s fandom activities. For now, I’ve stopped buying albums, and stopped going to fanmeets and concerts. I’ve allowed myself only 1 monthly-renewable streaming pass on Bugs which costs me about MYR33.90/mth. My goal for this year is to cut down expenses and pay off my credit card bill. Once it’s zero, then maybe I can start saving more.