December 2023 Budget

I'm going to be honest here, I completely winged it when it came to our finances this month.  There were a few other things going on, as well as the whole getting ready for Christmas, so I had kind of expected that this month wouldn't go particularly well.  That being said, having the Christmas sinking fund was a really good thing and meant that we at least didn't have to stress about that.  It's definitely something I'll continue to do in the future.

Despite all that we actually didn't do too badly this month.  Specifically on the food spending, which is where we usually have a problem.  Our spending on takeaways and eating out stayed right within our budget this month and we only ended up spending about £50 above our planned budget for groceries, including the big spend on Christmas food.

Our mobile phone bills have gone back to the normal price now as well, now that we've taken the roaming off them again.  I've also been keeping up with using the app to reduce my phone bill even further.  It's not a lot but it all helps and I get a weird feeling of accomplishment despite the small amount.  I did have a little moment when I was sorting out our breakdown cover and accidentally booked two covers, but thankfully I contacted the company and they sorted it out for me straight away which was very nice of them.  Always good to see money coming back into your account.  I was also able to do it all by email so I didn't even have to interact with a human.  Nice!

We also spent a little less on fuel this month, though I'm not entirely sure how we managed to do that.  I believe it was partly because we had a week where Ed was off work and my drive to work is a lot shorter than his, so I actually didn't need to fill up during that time at all.  I also got my first wage from my new job this month, but as the amount they have taken for my pension is less than I have planned I did need to make an additional payment this month as well.  I do need to look into increasing this automatic withdrawal for my next wage.  However, first I do need to find out how much I can actually increase it to as some have a limit on this.  This might mean that I'll need to continue making an additional payment to my own pension account as before.

Our personal spending has been really good this week, probably because we've been too busy spending on other people, so I'm very happy with that and hopefully, this will be something we can continue to do in the future.  Probably the biggest win is that we managed to put more money into our four-month savings, which got us to our new savings goal for this year and over the halfway point to our long-term goal.  Whoop whoop!

So, despite not really concentrating on our budgeting this month we have somehow managed to do pretty well on it.  I have to admit that some of it will be because we've been way too busy to be able to spend on unnecessary things, but hopefully, we'll be able to continue this next year so that we can get to our goals a lot sooner than we had originally planned.