A practical budgeting guide for Overseas Filipino Workers · Updated August 2026
In one sentence: record what you earn, record every padala, and the app shows you what you actually kept — in pesos, without a single login.
Most OFWs know two numbers by heart: the salary, and the amount they send home. What almost nobody knows is the third number — what is left after the padala, the transfer fees, and the exchange rate spread. That third number is the one that decides whether five years abroad turns into a house, a business, or nothing at all. This guide walks through using Katas ng Saudi to find it.
Open the appNew users begin in Simple mode, which tracks exactly two things: the money you earn each month and the money you send home. Nothing else. If you have never kept a budget before, this is the honest starting point — two entries a month is a habit you can actually keep.
The dashboard then shows three figures for whichever month you are looking at:
Underneath, one bar tells you what share of your income went home this month. For most OFWs seeing it for the first time, that percentage is a surprise.
Enter the amount in the currency you are actually paid in — SAR, AED, QAR, KWD, USD, SGD, HKD, and more are supported. The app fetches the day's exchange rate and saves it with that entry, so a salary logged last March is still valued at March's rate, not today's. That is what makes month-to-month comparisons meaningful instead of noisy.
Log the amount you sent, the transfer fee, and the method — bank transfer, Wise, Western Union, GCash, Remitly, LBC, Cebuana, Palawan, STC Pay, or a remittance centre. If you have the receipt, enter the exact peso amount your family received. Remittance companies use their own rate, which is rarely the mid-market rate, and the receipt figure is the truth. The app derives the real effective rate from it.
Do this for a few months and the history becomes a fair comparison of padala methods: same amount sent, different amounts arriving. The cheapest advertised fee is often not the cheapest transfer.
Full mode adds the rest of the picture, and you can switch to it any time from Settings — your income and padala entries carry over untouched.
Full mode also separates two kinds of padala that most people lump together: money sent as family support, which is spent once it lands, and money sent to your own Philippine account, which is still your savings. Tracking them apart is what stops "I sent ₱50,000 home" from being mistaken for "I spent ₱50,000".
There is no sign-up and no server. Every entry lives in your own browser's local storage. We cannot see your figures, because they never reach us. The trade-off is that browsers can clear their own storage — so download a backup file from the Settings page every so often and keep it in your email or Google Drive. Uploading that one file on any device restores everything.
The app also works offline. You can update your budget in the camp, on the bus, or anywhere the signal drops, and it will still be there.
That is the whole discipline. It is less work than the budgeting apps that ask you to categorise every coffee, and it answers the question that actually matters to an OFW.
Start tracking — it's freeWe publish practical guides for OFWs on the Katas ng Saudi blog — exchange rate timing, emergency funds, the family dependency trap, paluwagan and informal savings groups, credit card debt in Saudi, small business ideas for your ipon, and financial reintegration when you finally come home for good.