June 2021 Budget

This month didn't quite go to plan, but then there were a few things happening that did throw us off a little.  One was planned - our joint birthdays and an anniversary trip to Lundy Island - and one not planned - a funeral in the Cotswolds.  The way this month worked also meant that we ended up having two rents and other household expenses come out in one month. 

On the positive, our credit cards are still at zero, but the issue with the household expenses meant that my partner had to take some money from his emergency fund to put into our joint account to pay the rent.  We will be paying that back straight away in July in lieu of the rent, but it did make me glad that we had sorted out our emergency funds.

Even with that, we have still managed to put money into our Christmas and car sinking funds and managed to put a good amount into our four months saving fund, mainly due to one of us getting a nice tax refund.  This means that we are on track for reaching our financial goals by the end of 2021.  

And, in case you were wondering, we moved the money into the savings account before we realised that the second lot of home expenses were coming out.  As we had already decided that any money we received from things like tax returns would go directly towards our savings and pensions we decided to just leave the money where it was.

I'm very happy that I was able to put money towards my pension again this month.  This has definitely become a priority for me now for the rest of the year so, no matter the consequences, this will be paid in every month.  My future financial health depends on it.

Our spending on groceries and takeaways is definitely higher than what it was in the last couple of months, but I'm not going to worry about that this month because these expenses are mostly connected to our trips to Lundy Island and up to Cirencester.  Food is definitely where we spend most of our budget as we love food and, at the moment, it's not putting us into any debt which makes it difficult to see it as an actual problem.

Our joint personal spending has also remained the same and is still quite high and, whilst we mainly spend it on items for our crafting and other hobbies (and it also isn't putting us into debt), we could still probably reduce this.  Especially if we're wanting to complete our goal of having four months expenses put aside by the end of this year.  We've also done quite a bit of spending on birthdays this month.  This isn't really anything we would change but we do want to keep an eye on it so that we have an idea of what we want our birthday sinking fund total to be next year.

All in all, it wasn't a bad month apart from the slight miscalculation of when the rent would come out.  We do still have the slight problem of spending when it comes to food and hobbies, but it's so difficult to pull it in when we know it's not putting us into debt.  It also probably doesn't help that I have lived in a situation where I had to be very careful with my money, and now I don't have to be it's difficult for me to keep to that mindset.  I'm just not entirely sure how to break the hold, probably a little bit of research into that is needed and will be something I look into in July.