Browsing tag: spending

I’m definitely liking my bank’s tracking tool – it’s so easy just to go through and categorise transactions a couple of times a week, and it’s in colour! (Yes, I am stuck somewhere in prepubescence, with an attraction to bright colours, shiny things and sugary treats.) At a quick glance, I think our fixed expenses are in good shape, but a couple of other areas look out of whack, namely:

Dining and bars – ridiculously high this month. It did include around $80 worth of (reimbursable) mystery shops, brunch with the girls, graduation drinks/dinner and a couple of meals T bought while travelling back from Christchurch for work. Still, all those small purchases and weekend breakfasts and the bakery are obviously adding up. At the same time, we tend to spend fun money on food and eating, hence our fairly small entertainment category.

Clothes and grooming included my haircut, boring things like socks and sunblock, a cardigan for me and a new shirt and board shorts for T (both sorely needed). Plus a reimbursable $50 or so on beauty products (I’m starting to think I should just exclude these from categorisation!)

Utilities, almost half of that being T’s new phone (my present to him). Other than that, it’s not too bad considering this covers phone, internet, power and cellphone charges.

Which brings me to my January resolution: Be more aware of food spending! If we’re going to spend that much on food, it might as well be on excellent food rather than Chinese from the takeaway. I’ve been wanting to try out an Italian restaurant, for example (apart from Gina‘s). I also haven’t been to yum cha in a very long time, and I miss it!

Seeing as ASB has this handy tracking tool, I’m going to start making regular use of it!

Here’s what November looked like. Debt repayments are higher than usual, as T put an extra $100 towards his car loan, plus an unexpected $20 tax refund that showed up in his account.

We’re still spending a bit on eating out – definitely need to make sure we’re buying enough on our grocery shops so we don’t run out by the weekend and waste money on takeaways.

Entertainment includes both of our new cellphones and our monthly topup, and we paid our quarterly contents insurance bill.

I saved about $250, but excluded it from the graph because it was part of another transaction – otherwise it would’ve shown up as over $1000 saved! That’s the only drawback – each transfer can only be classified to one category, even if you bought, say, gas and food in one swipe. (That’s what weekly roundups are for, though I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be doing those…).

December will probably look a little out of kilter, what with the silly season and all, but we’re doing gift hampers for our families – baskets have been bought, and we’re planning to bake a lot of stuff – and just need to shop for T’s brother/nieces, and his mother, who’s getting an antique trinket box.

LINK LOVE

Carnivals I participated in this week: Carnival of Money Stories – My Financial Dreams’ Edition and The Carnival of Personal Finance #233!

$146 groceries (yep, a super pricey week. T bought a lot of lunch foods; I’m trying to get him to eat better, and eat more. He doesn’t eat breakfast and often skips lunch too. Is it any surprise he often has an upset stomach?)$146 groceries (yep, a super pricey week. T bought a lot of lunch foods; I’m trying to get him to eat better, and eat more. He doesn’t eat breakfast and often skips lunch too. Is it any surprise he often has an upset stomach?)
$29 gas
$20 brake fluid
$30 to top his cell phone up (I earned a free topup through YourVoice this quarter, doing surveys)
$18 on eating out
$7 for eye drops
$10 on a three-piece roasting/baking dish set
$16 for two wicker baskets (we’ll be making up hampers for Christmas presents for our families)

Also spent: $37 on pizza and drinks at Carpark, and $39 on a taxi to work on Sunday, both to be reimbursed.

An extraordinarily spendy week…

$9 – Saturday and Sunday breakfast
$34.30 – eating out over the rest of the weekend
$26 – two shirts, two singlets for T
$11 – five pairs of socks for me
$68 contacts (3 mo)
$9.50 car battery terminals (overtightened and broke when BF was doing stuff with the sound system)
$90 for groceries (woohoo! We went to the crazy expensive new New World in New Lynn as we were in the area, but shopped all the specials, and made out pretty well. The service is bordering on stalkerish- the trolley boy followed us from the door, across the carpark, and to the car. And they pack your bags for you. It’s great that it creates much-needed jobs, but I suppose that’s what jacks the prices up.)

I also tweeted last week  about this phone that I was thinking of buying. It’s a very very basic one, with a touch screen, but it has a much better camera than mine and is a huge upgrade from my 4 year old Sharp GX17!

T was also in need of a new phone – he’s been begging and borrowing other people’s castoffs for a few months now. And at half price, we figured this was a pretty good deal – ignoring the weirdness of us having the same model of phone.

The time has never seemed right for me to get a new phone, but this felt as good a time as any.

T already has his: I’m off to buy mine today. JB Hi-Fi was advertising it for cheaper than Vodafone itself (bless their hearts), so I’ll get it for $133 and hopefully sell the sim card pack for about $30. His phone cost $149, which he will pay back over the next few weeks. (He sold the sim card pack that came with it for $30, so that brings it down to $120).

Also, I took part in my first carnival! It’s now up: check out the Carnival of Personal Finance #230 at Canadian Finance blog.

Another expensive week! We had to get some work done on the car so it could pass a warrant, I bought a ticket to our end of year celebration/meet the editors bash, and then food and gas for our weekend away.

I also bought a beautiful new bag earlier this week – I’d been lusting after it for months and waiting for it to go on sale, but finally gave in. Plus, I wanted it for my interview on Thursday…the one that I had to cancel, yeah. But I’m really glad I finally bought it (not to mention that my old one was falling apart); half of that I had already set aside from my birthday money, and the rest came from all the overtime I was finally paid out.

Party ticket: $30 (I had to get out $40; stupid ATMs and not giving out tenners. If I remember rightly, we spent that ten dollars on food after I got home late and exhausted on Wednesday night :S)

Almost $120 on gas (that’s two  full tanks. We used about 1.5 to get there and back, plus a fair bit of driving around while up north. The rest will last us the rest of the week. It’s unbelievable how economical the first half of the tank is – we went SO much further than we did on the second half! Must start filling the car up rather than leaving it as long as possible.

$70 to hire scooters for an afternoon up north (seriously, hooning around on scooters is a GREAT way to sightsee.) They were $35 each; we rented one for the both of us, and paid for another for a friend, who’ll pay us back later this week.

$290 for work on the car plus a warrant (check) – included fixing up the rust in the boot, two new tyres, and fixing up the loose windscreen seal and the broken driver’s door lock (done when the car was broken into in Kelston….)

$30 for engine oil and a new oil filter

$60 for food over the weekend (around $15 of which, again, we paid for our friend and are expecting back). Included disappointing food at the ‘best fish and chip shop in NZ’  in Mangonui

$4 to go through the new Northern Toll Road (both ways)

And we still have to buy groceries for the rest of the week!

I’m still not sure how we’ll deal with the extra car and gas expenses – the trip was pretty spur of the moment. T is doing a few days’ worth of one-off work, and is due to be paid again for his coaching work (we’re still not sure how their pay cycle works. He was paid once, halfway through LAST month and not again since. He started there at the beginning of September, but had three weeks off due to school holidays, plus one rain day and today being a public holiday).

Despite the massive mountain of assignments I had to work on, this weekend shaped up pretty well!

I did a quick mystery shop on Sunday, did a spot of baking (using a recipe I’d been wanting to try out for ages), and caught up on laundry (I was all out of clean undies – no joke).

We also went grocery shopping – last week we spent $20 less than the budget, and this week we came in right on target. For our $120, we got tons of veggies, meat, as well as a couple of treats. Strawberries are back in season – woohoo! We also bought a couple of herbs – chives and basil – which I want to put out in the garden.

And lastly, we went up Mt Albert and went for a walk around the top. Now I’ve been up Mt Roskill, Mt Eden, Mt Atkinson… but never Mt Albert. The entrance is tucked up some leafy side streets; you’d never know how to get up there! The hillside is obviously a pretty wealth area. The houses are old and palatial and I wouldn’t even want to guess at how much they go for. Anyway, it was all very quaint – we went for a bit of a jaunt around the peak, looked for four-leaf clovers (unsuccessfully) and T picked a few flowers for me. Very Enid Blyton.

Spending

I finally got paid for all my overtime back during Fashion Week! Most of this went towards cancelling out the overdraft we racked up over the moving period.

$50 in Vodafone topups for both me and T
$22 at the butcher
$25 on gas
$80 at the supermarket
$22 at Fruit World
$21 pn misc. food and drink

Ouch, is all I can say. We spent quite a bit on food and fun – on Saturday our pantry was bare, so we bought lunch, then we headed over to the Diwali festival downtown at night, indulged in some scrummy Indian food, then onto a bar for a 21st. The bus lockout is also wreaking havoc on my budget and probably will continue to do so all week.

$20 for gas
$20 for the bus (thanks to the lockout)
$15 that BF spent on lunches during the week and technically wasn’t supposed to…
$9.30 for dinner on Thursday and $5 for my lunch on Friday (again, with the running out of food! This week though, I drew up a meal plan. AND we spent less on groceries than normal)
$4.50 for an emergency run to the shop for toilet paper
$8.20 for lunch on Saturday
$20 cash withdrawn, of which we spent $18 on various dishes from the stalls at Diwali. So worth it!!
$8 for two drinks at the bar
$3 for BF’s contribution to a barbecue today.

I also need to pay back one of my friends for a joint birthday gift from last week – I THINK it was about $24; I asked her to send me the details again, but she hasn’t replied…

Our kettle started leaking a while ago, and I finally got around to returning it this weekend. T’s sister had a spare one which she gave us, so we got a straight refund instead of simply exchanging it for a new one!

So, in: $29.99 back to us.

Out: $120 for groceries

$3 for six months worth of the pill

$12.99 for Saturday lunch (Indian food. So good)

$5 for a cocktail at my friend’s party (gotta love subsidised drinks)

$12 for a mini screwdriver set T needed to do one little job. Still considering whether to take it back – I guess it’s a little unethical though, plus he wants to keep it!