May 2021 Budget

May has definitely been quite an eventful month.  Lockdown has been eased but the weather has made it difficult to go places, rain has had a bit of an effect on my earning potential, I finally bite the bullet and after months of umming and ahhing ordered the fabric I wanted to make my trousers, the scary tax returns were done, we've moved into the land of birthdays and all the spending that goes with those, and I finally got my first Covid-19 vaccine (always good).  Some of these have had a bit of an effect on our spending and earning for May.

As always let us start with the good.  I still have my £1000 emergency fund and no debt sitting on my credit card.

We've also managed to continue putting money into our sinking funds for car repairs and Christmas, as well as actually putting away £401 into our savings account this month.  Most of this money actually came from the money I had put aside for taxes over the last financial year but then didn't need to pay.  As it was savings any way I just transferred it straight into our savings, which was a nice little outcome and means that we are almost halfway to completing our savings goals for the year.

I also put £225 into my pension which I'm very proud of and means I'm on my way to completing that goal for this year as well.

We are still spending quite a bit of money on food and household products, but looking back at previous months that spending has reduced quite a bit.  So, whilst it's not great it is going in the right direction and that's what I'm focusing on at the moment.

I've also decided to add some more lines to our budget to give us a better idea of where exactly the money is going and what we need to work on.  These are take-away which has actually turned out to be quite high, birthdays which won't really change much but is still good to have it out of our general spending category, and wedding spending as we are getting to the point where we're starting to spend money on this and it'll be good to keep an eye on it.  We don't actually have a budget for this last category, but we should probably do a bit of research and make a decision on it so it doesn't get too out of hand.  Not that it's going to be a particularly pricy wedding anyway.

One thing that has gone up quite a bit this month and of which I have no control over is fuel costs.  This is because it depends entirely on the location of my worksites.  I just have to hope that we get some sites closer to home soon and this will then reduce that number significantly.  There's also been some additional money spent on doing sightseeing things in May and that's absolutely fine.  We decided right from the start of the year that we didn't want to save money at the expense of not seeing the area we are living in at the moment so, as long as it's not getting us into debt, we're going to keep doing that for the rest of the year.

I suppose this month could definitely be classified in the 'could do better' category.  It wasn't a complete failure and we have done better this month than in the last few.  However, there is still room for improvement when it comes to unnecessary spending as earning potential is all down to the whims of the weather, and that's what we'll be working on in June.  How exciting.