Browsing tag: spending

(Click here for more info on my monthly spending roundups. NB: Because the ‘saving’ portion can get so confusing (on this graph it does not include regular savings from my main job) I may simply stop using the saving category for this purpose altogether, and deal with it separately from now. That way this will only truly represent “spending”.)

Clothes and grooming: Included a haircut for me and shoes and an electric shaver for him (he spends a lot on razors, and it’s hugely wasteful in an environmental sense too). It’ll still take many months to break even on this, but it should last years, save some plastic and irritate his face less. Oh, and it also included resizing and valuing of the ring (ah, so unromantic, but practical. Even though it’s not a wildly valuable ring, my insurance policy still needed me to “specify” it as an item. Nonetheless, it’s an estate or heirloom piece so it’s not exactly replaceable. It’s going to cost a couple extra dollars on my premium, which kind of made me wonder if maybe I should’ve not bothered at all? But it was also important to T, so it’s fine by me.)

Dining: As I mentioned the other day…we went over my goal of $160. But we had good eats, and I didn’t end up collapsing from starvation even on my long days.

Entertainment: Included golf in Taupo on the way to Wellington, a Dailydo voucher, bowling with friends, some arcade games and our $10 Fatso subscription (which I’m cancelling this month, as I’ve finally exhausted my list of old movies to watch. Plus, I now have an Entertainment book, which includes a bunch of video store rental vouchers.)

Groceries: Pretty on target for a four-week month.

Holidays: Included Wellington spending, passport fees, passport photos…

Medical: Hayfever meds for me, chafe cream for him – yep, the 3B stuff off the hilarious TV ad

Mystery shopping: Dinner and drinks, fully reimbursed

Saving: I actually saved a total of 42 per cent of my net income, yay!

T fun: Motorbike. ($1200). Plus helmet and gloves ($220). And other miscellany which I care not to know about – that’s how it works.

Utilities: Pretty ave…Orcon whipped up a deal with my employer, so I’m now going to be saving a few bucks a month on our phone/internet deal, plus some free landline to cellphone minutes! Good for phone interviews, too.

Vehicle: Lower than I expected! I may have almost halved my bus expenditure; I used to catch the bus from right outside home in the morning, but since the timetable changed, it’s never on time. So now I just walk up to Mt Eden Rd, where it’s only one stage, both morning and evening. Petrol’s insane ($2.18 a litre) but I hope once T and the bike are all legalled, registered and insured, that will go down significantly too. How thoughtful of him to pick a hobby which will also help out the ongoing budget 😛 (Yes, I’m aware of the initial outlay, but HE’S paying for all that jazz, thankyouverymuch).

I also brought in an extra $1061 in side income, of which I saved $562. The rest went toward passports, ring stuff, and a daily deal massage voucher.

(Click here for an overview of how I track expenses and what’s included.)

Clothes/grooming: Razors for him, three tops from the thrift store for me. (I’m thinking we need to go back to an electric shaver…)

Debt: To me…

Dining: Whee! Another month under $160. We’ve been busy, what can I say. Busy can sometimes lead to buying more food, but it’s generally cheaper food rather than proper going out and sitting down in a restaurant type meals. This included a lunch catchup with a friend, $20 spent at the food stalls at the CNY Lantern festival, our Valentine’s dinner at the cheap but AMAZING Angie’s Kitchen, and a splashy dinner at Lone Star (had a coupon. Meals were big, although not quite as massive I was led to believe.)

Entertainment: Bowling, golfing.

Fees: Six monthly Visa fees, which I didn’t actually pay out of pocket, thanks to rewards dollars.

Groceries: Managed to keep it low and come in under $500, so I’m ecstatic! Now, to stock up on spices again and get some baking noms…

Apparently even the prices we pay for produce at cheap greengrocers’ are expensive, according to you guys. I guess receipts don’t lie… Fabulously Broke, that was not $0.79 a kg! That was actually $1.99 a kg (the 0.79 referred to the weight of the bananas.) And that’s CHEAP AS CHIPS, girl. No joke.

As I told SF Ordinary Girl, sure we have to import a lot of stuff. But we also grow a lot of produce here, and we’re a nation of nothing if not sheep and cows, so red meat and dairy should NOT be this expensive. (To be fair, we don’t have to pay for health insurance, so maybe it all evens out)

Okay, I’m done talking about groceries. Like, for the next ten years.

Holidays: Booked our hotel for Wellington this weekend, and my birthday trip to Raro. Also bought two high-end sleeping bags from Kathmandu at the Travel Expo for dirt cheap. Travel is going to feature more in our lives, so it’s an investment.

Home: Standing fan. It was needed.

Medical: New contacts, plus cream for my eczema-ravaged skin. It’s calmed down now, touch wood.

Mystery shopping: A free lunch, plus cute stationery I’m going to give to a friend for her birthday (she loves Kikki.K)

Savings: See below for the accurate count, as usual

T fun: We handled this from the main account this month rather than his, at his request.

Utilities: A little higher than usual. We’re using more power as he constantly has the fan on (the joys of being unnaturally huge, I suppose)

Vehicle: A niggly little vibration in the left wheel started recently. T took it to three places. The first two found nothing wrong. But he persisted, and the third did – and they went the extra mile to fix it (result: new transmission, as it was cheaper than fixing the one part.) But now it’s back, so back to the mechanic we go. FML. We have the worst luck with cars. So there went $1500 this month, plus tons on gas because the crappy courtesy car we got chewed petrol like nobody’s business.

Work expenses: A lot of his courses/clothing is subsidised, but not wholly.

Extra income: I made an extra $141 this month. $100 was from my dad for Chinese New Year (ridiculously generous of him, but he’s a Rabbit and it’s the year of the Rabbit…guess he’s more sentimental than I thought). The rest was from mystery shops.

Savings… I didn’t keep a sharp eye on this but it looks like I put away 43% (not bad considering I didn’t get any freelance income this month.) But that was in turn all wiped out by the car repairs. LAME.

How was your February?

Wooop! Wellington lodge is BOOKED. I have many weaknesses; great ethnic food, all things dessert, and the beach spring to mind. Luxury hotels are another. This is not five-star accommodation (although at $150 a night you’d think it should be), but it will have a spa bath. 😀

It also means I probably won’t save much this month, as that alone is just over $450 for three nights.

And now, the cold hard numbers. Percentages, as always, are of total spending, not of income, so they’d be slightly lower in that context.

If you’re curious, here’s an explanation of how I track and categorise our expenses

• NOTES

Clothes/grooming: Haircut for him, new bra for me ($5 out of pocket !)

Dining and bars – $106? You must be joking! I think that’s a record low, and a WIN for keeping this to $160 and below. (To be fair, another $30 cash was spent on beer at Big Day Out. Clearly, I will be the one in charge of cash at Homegrown, and if he wants to drink he can sort his own money out. Also, we went to the annual Seafood Festival and spent $40 in cash, but I reckon that’s more of an event or entertainment :P)

Entertainment: We hit up the museum, arcade and the salt pools at Parnell Baths.

Groceries: Yikes, I knew it was a bad one, but sheesh. It was a five week month thought, right? We’ll see how close to $500 we can get this month (yay short months.) But I’m not sorry!

Holidays: Remainder of holiday/late New Year spending.

Insurance: Contents cover for a quarter.

Mystery shopping: Goodies from Lush. One of which turned out to be a skin saviour, and even though I didn’t score another survey this month, I went back with my 10% coupon to buy Dream Cream out of my own pocket. It’s clear I have chronic eczema, and I refuse to rely on steroid creams all my life.

T fun: More money on car sounds, mostly. The last of it. We now have embarrassingly loud bass, the kind that benefits nobody, that’s how much power it has. Although the amp came in a neat little engraved blondwood case…classy!

Vehicle: $460 on new tyres and alignment. (This was so out, it’s literally almost halved our fuel consumption. And with petrol at $2 a litre, we need all the efficiency we can get. Who knows, maybe we can drag a tank out to two weeks now?) There’s one more niggly issue we’re getting looked at (probably a wheel bearing), and hopefully that’ll be it for major costs for some time.

As for saving, actual total savings was 43.75% of my income this month. It was only 29.4% of my regular income though, so if it wasn’t for freelance I wouldn’t have hit the magic mark. T didn’t bring in much; he hadn’t accumulated any paid leave for the holidays, and worked some short days.

**  I often get questions about how I do my monthly roundups and track transactions, so I compiled a sticky post that hopefully sums it all up.**

I have never done an annual wrap. It’s quite an eye opener, isn’t it?

Some thoughts:

– I wish I’d kept track of every item of clothing bought. (Realistically though, I’m far too lazy.) I do know this included at least two skirts, two tops, two pairs casual shoes, runners, sandals, jacket, handbag, dress, boots. T bought new shoes, pants, shorts, some shirts and a jacket (plus possibly a couple other items on his own dime.) This category is actually clothes AND grooming, so also included things like haircuts, skincare, etc.

– Our eating out is basically staying within range, but as always, it could be lower. Y’all know I say this with reluctance, because while some people like to spend on clothes or shoes or gadgets or adventure pursuits, WE LOVE FOOD. I know if this included all his food spending, the total would be horrendous. This year I’d like to see if we can manage on $160 a month, even in milestone months (we go out to dinner, that’s how we celebrate).

Which brings us to entertainment. I calculate at least a third (roughly $850) was spent on concerts (7 tickets. 2 of them we haven’t been to yet!). There was another $300 or so on two more Metallica tickets too, which I onsold. Then BF’s Xbox, and a new cell phone, which brings us up to about the $1700 mark. The rest was little things like trips to Video Ezy, monthly Fatso DVD  subscription, a trip to the cinema every few months, visiting the driving range…and that’s probably the extent of it.

Fees and interest…well, you can see at what point I just decided to pay off the CC and get T to repay me directly.

We have some good weeks and some bad weeks with groceries. That much is obvious. Even in a lean month, it seems $500 would be the absolute lowest we can get by on. We could cut that to some extent if I was prepared to start buying dried beans and lentils and the like, but I’m not. Yet.

Almost half of “gifts and donations” was my dSLR alone. Yep.

Holidays included a fishing trip and road trip (him), some weekends away (us); events included birthdays and anniversaries. Did we get nearly $2000 worth out of those? I’m not sure. I guess it’s hard to gauge over several small, spread out trips. Generally, I don’t think these include gas for trips but do include things like food.

Obviously the big home expenses were moving costs and bond, and replacing our stolen computer and TV. (We did get insurance to pay a large portion via cheque.)

So much for cheap car insurance! We replaced our beater (which I didn’t include in here at all, actually), and shouldered the cost of full insurance. Contents insurance went up this year, too – boo.

Medical costs add up fast, do they not? Most of this was optical (lenses, eye exams, solution) with a few prescriptions and other meds thrown in.

Utilities registered a big blip when we moved. I still rage a little remembering why.

And our transport costs. About $1200 of that is me and my bus fares. Another $1000 or so on maintenance, at least. Perhaps $300 for annual registration. And PETROL. Let’s just say that at practically $2 a litre, $80 for a tank every week does not make a happy financial controller (that would be me.)

I had guessed around $500 for car repairs and maintenance, but we spent more like double that. Hopefully the ongoing costs of our current car will be lower, and even with increased insurance, the peace of mind that accompanies better reliability has so been worth it to date. T puts a lot of ks on the car, so tyres (EXPENSIVE) may not last as long as they otherwise would. What I really need to do is sit down and reassess what we put away each week for irregulars and calculate a new amount for 2011.

Side Income

Earlier in 2010 I set a reach goal of making an extra $4000, outside of my day job.

The total came to $5533, thanks mainly to freelancing, tutoring/editing, as well as focus groups,  gifts and mystery shops.

Which is actually a pretty big number. Where did it go?

I didn’t track exact dollar amounts but about $4000 was saved – I’m talking general savings, my travel fund and a little into our irregulars account. Maybe a little more. The rest was spent on “extras”, like clothes and shoes, contact lenses, the odd gift, an external hard drive.

In terms of mystery shops, I netted $687 in addition to $756 roughly of free stuff (clothes, beauty, food, lotto tickets.) Whee!

PFers, are you doing annual recaps? What on earth possessed me to spend the better part of a day crunching numbers?

I am so embarrassed (hides) – I’m pretty sure this is the spendiest month ever. Also, beyond the $495 in savings already noted here, I have no idea how much either of us actually saved in total (due to the way I handle cashflow). Nonetheless, it was probably more than wiped out by the various large purchases you will soon be reading about.

Clothes – New Dickies shorts for him. Woot pre-Christmas discounts.

Dining – I bought some lunches this month, had dinner with the girls, and as a couple we ate out a fair bit. It was a busy month. Still came in under $200.

Entertainment – Homegrown tickets $200, BDO tickets $240 (through a friend, otherwise would have been $320). Library fines, Fatso subscription. Box of beer brought to a friend’s birthday.

Groceries – We splurged on a fair bit of seafood. Also, it may have been a five week month? This also included some of those biscuit samplers which we bought for Christmas presents to give away, and beer to the tune of $40 which T paid back.

Gifts – we spent about about $200 on each other for Christmas. I got the headphones I’d been wanting, he got the collector’s edition of the new Star Wars game. And I bought myself a dSLR. Eeep.

Holidays – Our post-Christmas weekend away (might post a few pics later on), our anniversary, a little miscellaneous Christmas spending that wasn’t on gifts.

Insurance – I don’t know what the hell is going on. I thought our cover was to renew on the 29th (we have mail to that effect), and I asked T to call up to pay for the year ahead. They told him we were already paid up for a quarter and charged us for cover up until June instead. YEAHIHAVENOFREAKINGCLUE. Unfortunately, he’s the primary driver and the holder of the policy, so he generally deals with them. We’re going to have to up contributions into our irregulars account to pay for the increased cover; in the meantime I’ve paid for it from general savings.

Medical – Contact solution, eye drops, hayfever meds. $15 for 10 freaking pills!! Unfortunately, my allergies have been worse than ever, so I don’t have much choice but to fork out.

T lunch/fun – Still have this category from when all our spending was done from one account. I guess it’s a good thing, cause he a) occasionally accidentally pulls out the wrong card to use b) does it on purpose because he’s close to the line and then pays it back.

Utilities – a little higher than usual due to cellphone wastage and adding movies to our TV package. Which reminds me, I must get around to cancelling our Fatso subscription. I also noticed they added an HD charge to our bill and asked them to remove it (they charge in advance) so hopefully a refund will appear on our next statement.

Vehicle – $213 for our GPS, about $40 for new oil and a filter, and lots of gas.

The dSLR was on my “one day” list, but a friend happened to be selling off his to raise some cash, and I scored a Canon 1000D with bag and two lenses for $750. It retails for over $1000, and that’s with a lens with less of a range. Meanwhile, I’d been keeping half an eye on GPS bargains, and given that I/we hope to be doing more trips, it’s going to come in handy. We used it last weekend and if we go down to the Coromandel tomorrow, you can bet we’ll bust it out. I’m also programming in places that we want to go to at some point, like the Auckland Fish Market, certain restaurants and the like.

In terms of STUFF… we now have pretty much everything we could possibly want. One day – ie when we live in a bigger place with a lounge, say, and a proper kitchen – we’ll get a food mixer and maybe decent cookware, but for now I think we’re set.

Remember how, in theory, we should be able to get by on $2500 a month?

Well, we did! $2582 was the final number…okay, so a tiny bit over, but granted, we did buy a couple of Christmas presents early, which I decided to include here, and ate out a little more than usual. (What’s not included is our contents insurance, which was due this month, and the cost of our “new” car and associated expenses. They’re not in here because while one is budgeted for regularly and one was not so much so, neither are things we pay for in the course of a usual month.)

But it proves my maths skills are not totally hopeless and that yes, this is a realistic number for a four-week month without major special occasions, ie, birthdays, etc.

NOVEMBER SPENDING

Also, I made an extra $630 this month aside from my regular job – that’s from regular freelancing, a focus group and editing some rather dry economics essays. All of that went to my travel fund, which is currently sitting at just about enough to take us both to a tropical island for my birthday next year, or one flight to either California or London. Ahem.

Now, to the next order of business. While I love my monthly spending recaps, they don’t provide a full picture of what’s happening. They don’t include my regular savings. They don’t include T’s own fun money. It is simply a picture of (almost all) of our spending, and the percentages are relative. Er, by that I mean the percentages are the percentage only of our expenditure, not our total budget/income.

So, after much work, this is a more accurate snapshot. I don’t feel the need to start doing this regularly, but I did want to do it at least once.

TOTAL

As you can see, this incorporates savings, debt repayments (which is just T paying me back for some costs I covered for him once upon a time, that pesky insurance, and his spending money. My only real concern is that his allowance is larger than our eating out costs!

Anyway, the main reason I wanted to do this was to see if we were totally out of whack with our proportions. Here are some relevant links. The one I went with about as simple as you can get – the 50/30/20 budget.

• Basically, it posits that you should be spending:
  • 50% on needs
  • 30% on wants
  • 20% on savings

  In comparison, here’s ours:

  • 44% on needs
  • 11% on wants
  • 45% on savings (granted, this got a hefty bump from my side incomes this month)

As T says, we spend more on, well, living, than the few of our friends who support themselves. We also have regular internet (which more than pays for itself through the side work it affords me) and eat real food (ie, not just beans, mince, noodles and pies). I would argue, though, that our lack of drinking more than makes up for it. But let’s not get me started on that…Proportionally, I think we’re doing all right.

And just for fun – here’s the breakdown of where his money went this month.

Which actually seems quite reasonable in perspective…although I wonder if we can negotiate for his spending to come down a little bit more.