May 2022 Budget

It's been a little while now since I've been able to say that our finances are going well, but finally we have a month were we can.  This has been partly helped by me doing my tax returns early this year (I put money aside after every pay to cover my taxes at the end of the financial year, but I don't usually have to send all of it to the HMRC), the £150 we all got back from our Council Tax, and my husband having a full time job again - at least for now.  So, we're making the most of it whilst we can.

Our credit cards and personal emergency funds are still going strong, and we've managed to put some more money into our savings account.  It looks really unlikely that we'll reach our goal saving half of this emergency fund by the end of June, but we did have to use the savings to cover our bills after Ed lost his job and that is exactly what this saving is for.

I did use some of my tax return money to catch up on my pension payments so that's now fully paid up to the end of May.  This makes me very happy.  I also used some of the money to get out joint account back up to cover next month's general bills, so that was another worry off mind as well.

We've been pretty good on our spending on food, takeaways/eating out, and general spending, though I did spend some money on replacing an items of Ed's which was very important to him but unfortunately broke.  We do need to keep on improving on this though if we're going to reach our savings goals for 2022.

So, everything went much better this month compared to April, or in fact March, and it definitely made me glad that I'd been sensible and put aside that money every pay day.   Though we are in a much better place at the moment with both of us working full time jobs, we are very aware that the cost of everything is going up still, in some cases by quite a lot, so we're going to need to be very careful with our spending from now.  This is especially true as all predictions show that it's only going to get worse as we move into winter - oh joy.  At least this month has been a win and has set us up nicely for the months to come.