September 2023 Budget

Despite my hope at the end of last month, September has basically been the same as August, with us still going completely mad when it comes to food.  It doesn't help that there have been a few things going on this month and I haven't been particularly well so haven't had the energy I needed to really concentrate on our spending.  We've also been trying some new recipes just to add a bit more interest to our eating and they always contain expensive ingredients (why do they do that), but if we like them I'll be adapting them for future use.

All our other spending and bills have pretty much been the same as always, with me still being able to keep my mobile bill down to about a third of what it was at the start of the year.  We have spent about a quarter more on our fuel as we've been needing to do a bit more travelling due to family, but that should reduce again over the next couple of months.

We have started to do a little bit of Christmas spending as I work out what type of crafting I want to do for our Christmas cards this year.  I'm actually starting a lot later than I normally do when it comes to making these, but I should still have enough time before they have to be sent out.   We have also managed to keep our personal spending down again.  In fact, we have underspent again this month which is really, really good and a good habit to have developed.

We've also managed to put some more money into our four-month savings.  Not as much as I would have liked and had originally planned for us to do, but as we have already managed to reach our goal for this year anything we put in now is a bonus that helps us reach our long-term goal a lot sooner. 

As seems to be a running trend with us, food spending is where we have a problem.  We did try to do the cash spending again to curb it, but it didn't really work this time.  Partly because we kept forgetting the purse which contained the money and ended up also spending on the card, but also because we just enjoy our food.  This is something we still need to work on for the rest of the year to try and break this habit, especially as we don't know what my earnings are going to be after October.  We are going away in October, but the plan is to really work on our spending in the three weeks that we are home to help build up some good habits and to allow us to put more money into our savings.