January 2022 Budget

The first month of the year is over and, theoretically, we should have been on top of all the finances.  However, I have to admit that wedding plans have taken over pretty much everything and I haven't been putting as much effort into budgeting as I should be.

Thankfully, when it comes to the wedding we have money put aside for it so we're not having to take money out of our general budget to pay for it.  Every time we've pulled money out of this wedding budget I've added it to our income.  Having that has definitely given us piece of mind. However, we are having to keep to that budget the best we can as anything over then does have to come out of our monthly budget.  It's not a big budget and that has meant that we've had to do a lot of things ourselves.  It's the usual equation of time against money really.

Our income has been pretty standard these last few weeks, and it's looking like that will be the case for the rest of the year.  This means that it's our outgoings that we really need to work on to help us reach our goals this year.  Our general expenses are also going to pretty much be the same throughout the year it's really things like groceries and personal spending where we can save.

There were some additional expenses I wasn't really expecting to pay out this month, such as getting new bras (always ridiculously expensive for me) and I decided to get the wedding present for my partner now so that I wouldn't have to stress about getting it later.

I had decided, at the beginning of the year, to put our groceries budget up to £100 a week to fit with the price of food and to give us a little opportunity to get some treats etc which would hopefully reduce the amount of takeaways we had.  We've done pretty good on that front, but not so good on the takeaway front.  We were keeping to our one takeaway a week at the start of the year, but then we had two weekends of trying to get everything fixed with the wedding and then I got ill.  That's definitely one area we can get sorted again in February.

There shouldn't be anything we need to spend money on in the next couple of months (other than more wedding stuff) which should make putting money into savings a lot easier.  We haven't actually put any money into our savings at all this month, which isn't great really and means we have a lot of saving to do over the next two months.  Especially as I've set some pretty ambitious goals for this quarter on the savings front.  This is partly because of time off during the Christmas period where, as a self-employed person, I didn't get to earn anything and we've needed to build back up the money in our account.

I did pay off some of my credit card, about £300, and put some money into my pension - but not as much as I should have done and I'll need to put extra in over the next couple of months to get it to the amount it should be.  I still have about £450 on my credit card to pay and that's my main aim for this quarter.  

So what are my overly ambitious goals for us this quarter.  That would be for me to have paid off my credit card, have put £600 into my pension, have paid the car repair sinking fund off fully (about £100), half of the Christmas sinking fund paid (about £300 which is pretty unlikely I think but you never know), and have paid a quarter of what's left of our emergency fund paid (£700). I'm going to say that last one isn't going to happen, but a girl can dream.