How do you find the Total Transport Fares for your Bus or MRT Rides In a Day?

I track my expenses in Quicken for the last 11 years.

That means that on a daily basis, what I consume (whether goods or services), I will input them in Quicken.

One of the main problems is that, sometimes I took a trip that I was not familiar with, say I need to meet a friend at City Hall, and then I come back home. Usually, if you go to the MRT Station Machine, where you top up your fares, you will be able to see what is the aggregate fare.

However, I often came back forgetting to check.

The lazy person would hit that mental block of not remembering the fare, and would not put it into his or her expenses. Over time, this may become a setback whether he can continue and don’t continue with tracking his or her expenses.

The solution is that there are sites that help you to compute these fares.

I will introduce 3 to you here.

Calculate your Bus MRT Fares at  MyTransport.sg

LTA created MyTransport.sg and on the site, you can find much useful information.

Hidden somewhere in the numerous links is the link to a Fare Calculator >

You can create your own Bus and MRT Stack and then compute the total fares.

MRT.SG also has a Fare Calculator

Someone created MRT.sg and in it, there is an MRT fare calculator. I feel that it is not as good of a calculator to compare to MyTransport, but it is more intuitive in its user experience.

It might get the job done for you.

Check your EZLink Transactions after you Activate it Online

A reader alerts me to this means, and this is perhaps the most accurate since this is what the transport service charge you.

Unknown to me previously, once you activate your EZLink to be linked and activated to EZ-Link’s web portal, you would be able to:

1. Block your cards
2. Check past transactions (90 days)
3. EZ Link Card insurance

What you need is the CAN number of your EZ-Link card.

The logs are not very descriptive of where you were and where you are going, but for furnishing budgeting information, it’s rather good.

The problem with this is, one more web portal to manage. Since the username is using your NRIC, please generate a new password and not use a password meant for your more secured bank accounts.

Why do I track Daily Usage instead of how much I top up my Translink Card?

A lot of people will tell me it is easier if you just compute how much you spend topping up your Translink card, which is used to pay for your MRT and Bus fares.

The reason why I do that is that I adopted the accounting approach, which is to record down the transaction at the point of consumption of the service. This is to be inline with how up to date the budget is based on what we spent.

When I do this, I do not have the situation where I top up $40 on my Translink card but I only consume less than that.

This rule has made things easier to understand and less of a headache, when reviewing the figures.

We do not have to be too hard up on the numbers

At the end of the day, we need not be very correct on these numbers.

These sites are helpful for us to sort out the odd rides that are not very frequent. We should be able to remember the fares of the standardized routes or take the figures from the previous records.

In the grand scheme of things, if we miscalculated about 30-40 cents, it’s not going to make a big dent or get a huge repercussion on our financial well being.

Tracking is for a higher purpose, which is to be financially aware or to solve a spending problem, but with these sites, it should be less of a headache for you.

 

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