January 2024 Budget

This first month of 2024 has been a pretty good month when it comes to our finances and we have managed to reduce our spending in the way that we had planned we would by changing some of our behaviours, and not necessarily specific behaviours connected directly to finances.  We did have one big event this month which made our spending a little unusual for this month, which was our nephew's 18th birthday.

For my own health, I've decided to greatly reduce the amount of sugar that I have been consuming throughout the week.  I've not cut it out completely, it's nice to have some treats, but I no longer have it every day.  Reducing my sugar has meant that we no longer do regular trips to the shops to get it and this has ended up reducing our shopping bill by about £40.  Which is ridiculous when you think about it.  I've also made our meal plans a lot simpler so that I can meal prep all our workweek meals on Sunday.  This has meant that we now eat a lot healthier, it saves money on our grocery bill, and as it's already made we are a lot less tempted to order take-away.  We knew that we would be spending a little bit more in the last week as that's when we'd be travelling for our nephew's birthday, but what we weren't expecting was to both be ill which did mean that we ended up spending more on food than we originally hoped.

Due to how we've set up our bank account now, we were able to buy our TV license for the year in one go.  This was quite a big expense but it was also nice to know that we don't have to worry about it for the rest of the year.  This is something I'd like to set up for the other bills in the future, but that's once we've reached our saving goals first.  The rest of the spending has been pretty similar to previous months.

Our personal spending has also been down this month, mostly because we've been a lot more mindful about spending.  I've made a list of things I would like to buy in the future and the amount they'll probably be so I know how many weeks I need to save up first before I can actually get them.  Ed is also doing the same thing, so this should keep our spending in budget throughout the year.  We've also managed to put a good amount towards our Christmas sinking fund and saving goals, which always makes me happy.

So it's been a good start to the year and our new habits are doing well.  We plan on carrying on these for the rest of the year and, if we do, we should be able to reach our financial goals pretty quickly.  In the past, we worked out to set up the base for our finances, and now that means we can build on them.  Hopefully, by the end of this year, we'll have gotten much closer to being able to fully enjoy the money we earn. 

January 2023 Budget

It's been a pretty good start to the year when it comes to our finances.  We've still had a couple of slip ups, but nothing big and we've been able to make up for them pretty quickly.  The most important part of this month has been starting to form the habits that we're hoping to carry on for the rest of the year to reach the financial goals we have for 2023.

Our general bills did go up a little last year and we've had to take that into account along with the addition of the car payment of £220 a month.  Due to this we've decided that we do need to start being a lot stricter with our spending elsewhere - especially when it comes to our personal spending.  With that in mind we have been good with our groceries spending, keeping that in budget for the month despite including household spending and the fact that we're no longer using cash.  I think having a few months where we could only use cash broke our habit of just constantly spending on food and now we're able to keep that going whilst using our cards.  If we ever find ourselves slipping again we can always go back to cash.

We didn't do quite so well on our takeaway and eating out budget, but we pulled back on the spending in the last couple of weeks and managed to finish the month in budget.  Also, despite the amount of driving we did this month trying to see as many English Heritage properties as we could we actually managed to stay under budget for January, so the hybrid is definitely helping us save on fuel in the way we hoped it would.  It doesn't quite make up for the monthly payment we have to make for the car, but it helps pay towards it.

Even though I'm now paying less money into my pension then I did last year, taking it down to 12.5% of my pay, it's still quite a good amount and more than I originally thought it would be.  Any money going into my pension is good, especially as I recently did a calculation of how much money I would have after I retired based on what I have so far and it really wasn't good.  

As with the takeaways we did have a couple of blips with our personal spending, which is meant to be £25 each a week, but some of that was on having to get my engagement ring fixed and we also pulled that back across the month by reducing our spending later on.  So we've managed to end the month on budget with this as well.  Having the budget has been a good check every time we think about spending some money and we really think about whether we really need or want to item before we get it.  We also discuss our spending with each other a lot more, which is good as it makes me feel more like we're working towards our financial goals together now.

Lastly is our sinking funds and savings.  We were able to put in our first £75 of the year into our Christmas sinking fund and the last payment we needed to get our car repair sinking fund back up to the £500 we wanted (something we hopefully won't need to spend any time soon but good to have just in case).  We still need to work on our other sinking funds, though the sailing lessons sinking fund is on the back burner for now, and our four months savings funds but it's a start.  I'm expecting us to get better once we get more into the swing of things.

All in all, it's been a pretty good start to the year.  We didn't get as much saved as we would have liked, but this is a five week month and I'd accidentally planned for it to be a four week month so we've actually done pretty well.  We'll see how things go with February, which is actually a four week month - I've double checked.  One of the good things we found out this month is that we're not actually that bothered about not spending money on things and we do really enjoy the free activities we did throughout January.  Hopefully this is something we can carry on for the rest of the year.

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.