2020 “re”-budget + lockdown impulse purchases + exciting announcement

Apr14
by TFS on April 14, 2020 at 9:55 am
Posted In: Budgets, Children, Random Thoughts

 

As I mentioned in my last post, with all the lack of options for spending going on for what’s looking like at least another 2-3 months, and then further disruption after that, it might be a good time to re-evaluate the 2020 yearly budget.

The good news is that seeing as I never did one in the first place I haven’t wasted my time – pays to be a lazy sod sometimes I guess 😉

Of course there is every chance that if you follow a really tight budget already and don’t spend too much money going out etc your budget will remain pretty much the same as it always has done, but for us who are in the “moderately frugal” camp at best, it’s definitely worth thinking about.

 

2020 spending so far

Having a quick look at Money Dashboard 1 this is what we’ve spent so far this year:

Monthly Spending 2020:

  • January: £3592
  • February: £3979
  • March: £4183

Total: £11,754

Seems like quite a sizeable chunk already!

However when you multiply that quarter of a year by 4 we’re already running at £47,016 which if we kept to that, it would be £4k lower than last year, and £7k lower than 2018.

The 3 months of 2020 have already included some pretty large “one offs”:

  • A fully paid off holiday in May that we have optimistically moved to near the end of June (Hmmm)
  • Another paid off holiday/mini break that got moved to December (more confident about that one haha)
  • £900 worth of small building projects
  • TFS Jr’s birthday
  • DIY stuff for the spare room – see announcement below 🙂
  • Lot’s of going out for me as I was trying to get all of my “last night(s) out in London” done before I left that world for good(!?)
  • Some silly impulse purchases due to Lockdown

 

lockdown impulse purchases

Apart from chucking £20k at VWRL which I am thinking was probably a sensible move, we also made a few rash purchases in an attempt to keep us sane occupied while we’re stuck at home. So far this has been:

  • 7x10ft Trampoline that takes over half our garden (oops). It’s rated for adult weight though so we’ve all been having great fun on the thing as well as TFS Jr. Hopefully gone for the “buy once, buy right” strategy here and this will last us for years.
  • A 3000-in-1 Retro Arcade games 2-player arcade stick console thingy. It is probably going to be a pile of poo from China, but it sounded pretty good for £105. I love all the old arcade classics like Street Fighter 2 and playing them on what looks like a proper arcade stick set up looked too good to resist! *Update* – It’s arrived! It’s pretty good, has got 1000’s of games, although having watched more youtube reviews of these things since there is a slightly better once out there. If I get any good usage out of it I may upgrade to the better one (you can replace the mainboard for about £50). If you like retro arcade games and can’t be bothered with manually doing it all on a raspberry pi, these are pretty good. If anyone is interested let me know and will link in the comments.
  • Various DIY bits n bobs to keep us busy with “projects” around the house (paint to be the next thing people are panic buying I reckon!?)

 

Going forward, even if the full lockdown only lasts another 4-6 weeks it is obvious that business as usual will not be happening for at least another month after that which takes us to the end of June, so purchasing “only essentials” (barring the odd amazon order here and there no doubt) looks like business as usual for a while.

In addition, once this is all over, we are just not going to be able to squeeze in any more holidays or other significant spending this year due to…

 

big announcement

We are due to be having another baby which is due in the middle of August, yes TFS Jr II (might have to come up with a better name for him on the blog) will be greeting us in person very soon.

And yes, we’ve already found out the sex and it is going to be a boy!

So all those old girls baby clothes we saved are now useless, but on the plus side we’ll have one of each which is always nice 😉

We’re obviously very happy about it and can’t wait to meet the little fella, despite all of the craziness of the world going on around us right now.

Anyway from a financial perspective it probably means the chances of spending much money for the rest of the year are severely limited even if things are back to normal by mid summer, which given the current situation on my side-hustle income is probably a good thing!

Looking back at our budget in 2016 when TFS Jr was born, we spent a whole £6k less than we did the following year. You could argue that the increase in 2017 was just pent up demand and we went on a spending spree, but then we spent even more in 2018 so I don’t think that is the case here. I genuinely think that having a very small baby severely limits the things you can spend your money on for at least 6 months – kind of like a self-imposed lockdown really 🙂 – so I am expecting to see a similar down turn in our spending.

 

back to the budget

So just quickly to wrap up the budget, if we add on the 3-4 months of actual lockdown to our self-imposed new baby lockdown for 6 months that takes us to the end of the year!

I think it’s fair to estimate that our “background” level of spending on day to day things is going to come in at around the 3k/month mark. I would be really surprised it it was any higher, and think it could end up being considerably lower. But anyway let’s say 3k for the final 9 months and add that to our current total and we get:

£38,754

This would pretty much match our spending in 2016. Ah the good old days when our yearly expenses started with a “3” 🙂

One final big “HOWEVER”…. There are a few final, rather large, expenses in the pipeline. This is all lockdown pending, if we can get the people in to do it in a timely fashion before baby arrives, and it’s legal to do so due to social distancing measures!

  • New boiler, water tank, radiators and solar panel diverter water heater – £7000 2. This is a home improvement that has needed doing for a few years now. At least we can say it should probably increase value of our home if we sold any time soon (not that we will but still…) and also it should save us a small amount on our gas bill each month due to more efficient boiler, better room by room temperature settings and controllers, and the solar panel diverter providing hot water when excess electricity is being generated, rather than pumping it out to the grid (thereby saving more on gas bill).
  • Dropped kerb and driveway at the front of house – £6000 – Basically I reaaaaaaally want to get an electric car soon, and there is no way of charging it on street where we live so we would have to turn our front “garden” into a driveway. It’s a bit crap as I never really liked that look, but we never use it as a front garden at the moment anyway as it’s covered in pebbles and is far too small to do anything else with. Also I appreciate that the money is a fair whack just to be able to buy an even more expensive car than we currently own, but I am really hating the fact we are driving a crappy old diesel guzzling ICE motor when there are much cleaner versions out there. I am happy to pay the green premium for this, now that I think we can actually afford it, seems like the right thing to do. Even more so than the boiler, the money on the driveway is not totally lost because if we ever come to sell it will have increased the value of the property. I think in 5 years time the EV bandwagon will be truly running at full steam (full battery?) ahead, so why not get ahead of the game here before the dropped kerb/driveway fitters are all booked up haha.
  • Due to the above point, possibly a new plug in hybrid car 🙂 – Been looking at the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV. – £10k. A big price tag but on the plus side I test drove it and it was amazing getting that EV driving feel (no gears, instant torque, etc…) and it should save us around £40/month on Petrol. That’s a very long pay back period on the investment but as I say there are plenty of other factors involved and it’s not an attempted money saving exercise.

If we add all these onto our budget we are now looking at a yearly expense total final dead final total and cannot possibly add anything else total of….:

£61,754

Eeeeep.

 

I’ve already commented enough above so won’t attempt to try to justify this any further, I guess all I can say is that it’s maybe quite fortuitous that lockdown happened to stop us actually spending any more than that this year!

 

How has lockdown affected your budget? Have you reforecasted for the year or just going with the flow and seeing how it pans out?

 

 

Notes:

  1. They’ve recently introduced Open Banking which is great as it’s more secure than the old way they scraped your transactions, but American Express isn’t currently on this system or they haven’t integrated it yet, which now makes it useless for us as a huge chunk of our transactions are now missing!!! 🙁 Anyway I manually added them from March so figure should be ballpark correct). ↩
  2. This may sound high but there could be quite a few big changes in where things are positioned so budgeting in slightly more just in case the quotes come in higher ↩
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