How are the additional hobbies going?

I had decided to start these new(ish) hobbies last year, but it was at the start of this year that I properly set everything up to make it easier for me to do them consistently.  Including putting together a little tracker in my diary for most of them so that I could tick off when I did them.  It's only been a couple of months but this is how they're going so far.

Skateboarding - this is still taking a little while to get myself into actually doing it and that's probably because it's something I have to do in front of other people which always makes me uncomfortable.  There's also quite a big possibility of me hurting myself, which I always worry about as it could affect my ability to do my job.  However, if I want to learn this skill I do need to get over that, especially as I could also hurt myself just tripping on a pavement.  I usually wait until my husband is off on the same day as me so we can do it together, but that has led to there being very few times available to do it so I've stopped doing that and now just go out on my own on Saturday mornings, with my bike helmet on regardless of how it looks.  I do feel that I am beginning to get the feel of it a little bit more.

Flute practice - I've been managing to practice this around once a week.  Obviously more often would be better and as I get more into the swing of it I'll probably try practicing on the weekends as well.  It's really just finding the time to fit everything in.  It is beginning to come back to me, but it's still frustrating to not be able to play how I used to.  I'm going to give myself until the end of this year to see if I want to keep going or not.  At least I can now string a song a long, even if it's not particularly well.

Drawing - again I have managed to get this in about once a week.  At the moment I'm just practicing drawing the shapes that become animals from a book I brought on how to draw Kawaii animals.  However, I do want to start being able to do this on my own and I think I might need to look a little more into the reasons behind each shape that then becomes a being.  I also want to look a little more into how to actually draw the human shape if this is going to lead to where I hope it will, so I'll need to find something on that as well.  Again, I'm giving myself until the end of the year to see how this goes and after that, I'll decide if I want to keep going.

Board games - we actually haven't really done this that often.  In fact, it had gotten to the end of January and we'd only actually played some games once.  So we decided we needed to make an actual effort and place the games in an area that was right in front of us, and now we are playing board games once a week as planned.

Reading - this is another thing that had already started to fall to the wayside before the end of January even came around.  I realised that it was partly because I wasn't making time for it like I should have been, but also partly because I hadn't given myself the variety of things I usually like to have when I'm reading.  So I've added a non-fiction book into the mix and the wildlife magazines I keep forgetting about and this has made things a lot more appealing.  I might not be getting through as many individual books but I am getting the variety that I like and, in the long run, it'll actually lead to more books being read than before.

I am hoping that having a tracker I can keep ticking will lead to a number of these hobbies becoming habits.  Unfortunately, it wasn't working particularly well to begin with, but now that I've made the rule that I'm not allowed to miss any of these two times in a row that has made all the difference in making me keep up with what I want to do.  It may seem a little bit weird to do this with hobbies, but if I don't make time for them it's very likely that I'll never do any of them.  There are a lot of hobbies I would like to try and do and if I keep on not doing any of them I'll always wondering about them and my abilities.  This way I can keep trying new things, seeing if they are something I can take to, and then making a decision to keep doing them or not.  At least this way I'll actually know.

February 2024 Budget

February has been a mixed bag when it comes to the success of our budgeting.  We did spend over what we had budgeted for, some of which couldn't be helped but some definitely could have been, but we also somehow managed to put a good amount towards our savings.  Could we have done better, obviously yes, did we still do really well...also yes.

As always, our spending on our general bills has pretty much remained the same, which is actually lucky as it means none of them have been put up just yet.  We did, however, spend more on our gas bill and that's because this month has been a little bit colder than the last so our heating has had to work harder.  I'm expecting March to be pretty similar, but then after that, we should be able to get our gas bill back down again.

I did buy a few more things for our house than I normally do (in fact normally I spend absolutely nothing) but that's because we've decided to stay here a little bit longer than we had originally planned so I want to fix some things that had been annoying me a little bit.  It's not really that important, but it does make living here more enjoyable for me at least.  We also quite a bit on food again this month.  Whilst it's been nowhere near as bad as the spending we did last year we are sneaking back into old bad habits.  It's not anything we can't pull back on and March will be the month we do that on.  Food spending is always going to be our weak point so we really do need to keep an eye on it.

We've been spending more on fuel as well and a big part of that was due to the fact that my work was in a different location to Ed's so when he came to pick me up at the end of the day we were putting extra miles on the car.  Now that my new job is in a similar location to his that should bring the cost back down again, although we are doing a trip to Swindon next month so I do expect that it won't drop completely in March.

That's also where the cost for the day out has come from as we've booked an Airbnb for the one night we're in Swindon and there'll probably be some extra spending on things like food when we're there as well so that's something we should really be putting money aside for - something to think about when the craving for a takeaway comes along.  Our own personal spending hasn't really been great this month either.  Firstly we needed to restock the oils that we use to make my face moisturiser and Ed's beard oil.  It was over £70 but it should last us for the year at least.  I then got water damage on my phone and needed to get a new phone screen.  Thankfully as I have a Fairphone I was able to just buy that online and then change the screen myself, but it did still cost about £85.  However, even with those two large spends our personal spending in total didn't end up going over our budget by too much and, as we underspent last month, I'm not too worried about it.

The biggest plus for this month is how much we were able to put into our savings and sinking funds.  We did sell some things in January and that money went straight into our savings, but we were also able to put quite a bit from our wages into savings as well and I decided that we would just complete our sinking fund for Christmas so that our main focus for the rest of the year can be on our four months savings.  That has been a really big positive for us and a good incentive to keep us working towards our financial goals for this year.  

So, some ups and downs, but overall I feel like February has mostly been positive.  There are definitely places where we can improve and, if we want to keep doing as well as this, we need to improve as our income will be dropping a little bit from March.  However, I think we can do it and that means we could actually reach our savings goals a lot earlier than we have planned.  Now that would be very satisfying.