How to track money sent from Singapore to Malaysia

What actually happens when you send money

You are not "transferring" money. You are selling one currency and buying another, and the price of that trade is the exchange rate you receive.

Every provider makes its money in one of two ways, and often both. There is an explicit fee, which is easy to see. And there is the spread — the gap between the mid-market rate you will find on a search engine and the rate the provider actually gives you. The spread is the part that is designed not to be noticed.

This matters because the spread is usually the larger of the two, and it is the one nobody quotes you at the point of transfer.

Working out what a transfer really cost

The number you want is the rate you actually achieved: the ringgit that arrived, divided by the Singapore dollars you sent. Everything else — the headline rate, the promotional "zero fee" claim, the loyalty points — is beside the point.

An illustrative example, with deliberately round numbers:

• You send S$1,000.
• The mid-market rate that day is 3.50, so the "fair" outcome is RM3,500.
• The provider quotes you 3.45 and charges no fee.
• RM3,450 arrives in your Malaysian account.
• Your achieved rate is 3.45. Against the mid-market rate you gave up RM50, which is 1.43% of the transfer.
• Now imagine the same provider had quoted 3.42 and charged a S$3 fee. You would have received RM3,419.70 — an achieved rate of 3.4197, or 2.3% below mid-market. The "cheaper" fee was the more expensive transfer.

That is the whole argument for recording the achieved rate. Once you have it, providers become comparable, and you can see when one quietly gets worse — which they do, because the spread is the easiest price to raise without anyone noticing.

The recording mistake almost everyone makes

Sending money home is not spending. But in most apps and almost every spreadsheet, it is recorded as if it were — and that single mistake distorts everything downstream.

Here is what typically happens. The S$1,000 leaves your Singapore account and gets recorded as a S$1,000 expense. The RM3,450 arrives in your Malaysian account and gets recorded as income. Your Singapore month looks like a disaster, your Malaysian month looks like a windfall, and your actual net worth is unchanged because you moved your own money from one pocket to another.

The consequences compound. Your spending figures are wrong by the size of your remittances, your savings rate is understated, and any budget built on those numbers is built on sand. For a household sending RM3,000 home every month, that is not a rounding error — it is the dominant line in the accounts.

The fix is to record both halves as what they are: two legs of one movement, linked to each other and excluded from both spending and income. What remains is the only figure worth having, which is the achieved rate.

How to do it in Spend X Save

Once a few months of transfers are linked, the pattern becomes visible. You can see whether an apparent "rate improvement" was real or just a day when the market moved, and you can hold your own history up against a provider’s marketing.

If you transfer the same amount on roughly the same day each month, the app will usually detect it as a recurring series on its own and tell you when the next one is due.

• Enter the outgoing amount in your Singapore account (S$1,000, marked as going out).
• Enter the incoming amount in your Malaysian account (RM3,450, marked as coming in).
• Open either entry and link them as the two halves of one transfer.
• Both disappear from spending and income, your net worth is unaffected, and the pair now reports an achieved rate of 3.45.
• If you later find the actual recipient amount was different — fees taken after the quote, or a provider that credits a day later at a different rate — edit the incoming entry and the achieved rate recalculates.

A note on why the mid-market rate is the right yardstick

The mid-market rate is the midpoint between what buyers and sellers are asking for at that instant. It is not a rate any consumer can actually get — no business sells at cost — so it is not a target.

It is, however, the only neutral benchmark available. Comparing your achieved rate against it converts a provider’s marketing into a single number you can track over time, and that is all it needs to be.