January 2021 Budget

That's January over and done with already.  It went a lot quicker than I thought it was going to, but I still managed to keep a note of our spending as it whooshed by.  This month was more about having a look at what we usually spend our money on rather than keeping to a budget so that we can see where our money goes and what we need to work on.  That being said, it's funny how keeping a note on what you spend makes you think twice before buying something.

There were quite a few wins this month, which is a really nice way to start the year.  Firstly, the credit card debt from buying our car is all paid off, which was just under £740 so I'm very happy with that, and I haven't had to use my initial emergency fund of £1000 for anything.  We even managed to put some money away into our 6 months emergency fund, which now sits at £465.88.

As well as the emergency fund, we've put away our first month's sinking funds for Christmas presents and car repairs.  I was also able to send £200 to my pension fund, a little bit less than I had originally planned when I spoke about my intended pension contribution, but this is an amount I thought was more realistic for me to do on a monthly basis at the moment.  I did actually forget to write about my intended pension contribution in my Goals for 2021 post (updated now) which adds another £2400 to the money not going on general living.

We're still flat hunting at the moment, which does mean that there's a big chunk of money we're not having to spend right now and the reason we were able to pay off the credit card debt so quickly.  It'll be interesting to see how we go once we have this additional out-going, which, along with all the utility bills, I estimate at being around £700 per month.

I had hoped that a little bit more money would be coming in once I had begun working but unfortunately, as my work is very weather dependent, I haven't earned as much as I had hoped.  As we move into spring and summer this should change, but at the moment I'm just grateful that I have any work at all.  I'm also really enjoying being outside all day long again.

Looking at our budget I would say that our biggest downfall is groceries, and that's mainly the snacking food we keep going out to buy instead of our general larger shop that happens once or twice a week.  It would be no over-estimate to say that reducing these would probably save us at least £100 a month.  We also got more takeaways than we should, but I don't want us to stop this treat completely, so maybe we'll just have it once a month.  I also did a shop one week at Tescos, rather than Aldi which I've been trying to mostly do, and the difference in the receipt at the end was quite eye-opening.  There are also a couple of bigger buys of £85 on shoes, £45 on a skateboard, and £50 on birthday presents, but as they are only now and then purchases I'm not too worried about them.

All in all, I would say that it's been a pretty good month, with some good lessons learnt.  We definitely need to keep an eye on the food spending.  And maybe we should accept defeat and bulk buy some of the snacks we keep eating during the week instead of pretending to ourselves we're definitely going to be healthy and end up buying them individually at a much higher cost. 😂