January Expenses / Income Report plus Free Spreadsheet
You won’t find George Osborne rocking a budget this hot…
The consensus is in, if you want to get your expenses down you better damn well post them on your blog for all to gawk at and to keep them focused like a laser beam burning a hole into your frontal lobe at all times. So I better give it a go considering my last 6 months of spending like a recently crowned lotto lout let loose in TK Maxx.
I’ve always found these things pretty tedious on most other PF blogs so apologies if you do too. Please skip over this (and future) posts briskly and I will post something more exciting in a few days time, promise! Wait, where are you going…!? 🙂
A new dawn, a new day, a new free spreadsheet
Thanks to Under The Money Tree with his comment here for giving me the inspiration to set up a new spreadsheet. His idea was to encompass all spending categories for each month of 2015 1 into a column, with totals as a row at the top for each month and columns on the left for category spending over the year. I took it one step further and added in an income section, and therefore a savings percentage, plus a Net Worth 2 and then I can even work out years to FI on the fly given your savings rate that month (if you kept that up) and for the average savings rate for that year. Take a look and see what you think, I think it is pretty cool. Any suggestions for additions welcome of course!
You can view and then copy the spreadsheet onto your google drive to edit and use yourself for free here:
If you want to use it, you will have to clear down my January column but that will take about zero seconds. You may also want to change some of the category names, and remove things like “TFS” and replace your own, much cooler name(s) there. I have set it up to work with good ole MoneyDashboard categories (still copying them over manually, but this is now a 10 minute job once a month which I think I can handle) so your category names of choice may well be different.
January Income
| Categories | January | Notes |
| Total | £3,842.19 | 1 |
| TFS | £2,432.36 | 2 |
| Mrs TFS | £1,050.77 | 2 |
| Interest TSB 1 TFS | £5.84 | 3 |
| Interest TSB 2 Mrs TFS | £6.73 | 3 |
| Interest Santander | £10.76 | 3 |
| Cashback Santander | £3.44 | 3 |
| Cashback CCs | £0.00 | |
| Solar Panels | £57.29 | 1 |
| Gifts | £235.00 | 1 |
| Sold stuff | £0.00 | |
| Refunds | £0.00 | |
| Other | £40.00 | 4 |
- A pretty good month for income as we received some cash gifts for Xmas which we deposited into the bank, plus we got our first Solar panel quarterly payment. Whoo! It was a bit meagre at just £57.29 but I am hoping that the summer months more than make up for that!
- Important note: This is not our total income from our jobs, as we both save £250 each which goes into a sharesave scheme. This is accounted for in the final set of rows I will go through in a minute (actually on the spreadsheet, those rows appear above income, but thought it best to do it this way around). I also pay for a train ticket to work which gets auto deducted from my paycheck. As I know with 100% certainty this is one expense I will not have if/when I reach FI, I just don’t count it as income or an expense, as it is completely irrelevant to any of the other calculations.
- As you can see I am counting interest received etc as income, but won’t include dividends or price appreciation of any shares we hold. This is because bank interest is pretty predictable, whereas the others are not so much.
- I can’t even remember what this was for. Sorry!
January Expenses
Total expenses: £3,060.92
To keep this post short just have a look again at the spreadsheet here and I will highlight any oddities or things I think we did well/badly on here:
- Groceries £183.86 – Happy with that. If we keep that up for the year I would be very happy. We did have a lot of food left over from Xmas, but on the other hand we did host quite a few people over for dinner as well, so it probably balanced out.
- Clothes £159.88 – Oh dear. Mrs TFS finally admitted “she thinks she has a problem” to me earlier this month 3 but the damage had already been done for January. She is going cold turkey for Feb and March. I’d be very impressed if that happens and am rooting for her big time! 🙂
- Holiday £479.00 – We paid for a holiday we are taking in May for my mum’s 60th birthday. Not much we could have done about that (other than not going, obviously!)
- Car service/mechanics £372.43 – The (un)trusty old TFS-mobile had an MOT and failed on quite a few small things that added up to a pretty big cost. Following my own advice I had a pop at doing some of it myself to save cash but couldn’t do it all. I will post very soon about how my first adventures in car mechanics went!
- Dining & Booze £50.40 – Well happy with this. However I’d be an idiot to think it will stay this low all year. 🙂 – But a good start nonetheless
- Golf £99.43 – About spot on for my £100 a month target here. I can’t really play in February either so a good start to the year in this category as well
- Overall £3,060.92 – This was an expensive month but it was mainly down to the car and paying off the holiday. It is above our run rate of average core expenses of £2,641.08 I laid out here which is a shame. I am confident we can get the average down after the shorter month of Feb, and I am doing 2 half marathons so won’t be out drinking much again (if at all) so should be looking at a cheaper month, barring any other unforseen expenses.
January Savings Rate
| January | Notes | |
| Net Worth | £54,307.85 | 1 |
| Years to FI | 23.69 | 2 |
| SAVING PERCENTAGE | 34.98% | 3 |
| January | ||
| Total Savings | £1,646.79 | 4 |
| Income vs Spend | £781.27 | |
| Share Save 1 (TFS) | £250.00 | |
| Share Save 2 (Mrs TFS) | £250.00 | |
| Pension 1 (TFS) | £302.00 | |
| Pension 2 (Mrs TFS) | £63.52 |
Notes
- Consists of 3 different ISAs, a SIPP, mine and Mrs TFS’s work pension fund, cash savings, and our sharesave totals. Does not include house equity as this will not help me produce income when I retire, although I realise that imputed rent is a key factor and is clearly worth something. Let’s save this debate for another day shall we, it’s late and I need some sleep! 🙁 I’ll look at this again in depth hopefully very soon and work out the best way to factor it in, seeing that it was nearly a year ago I first very nearly wrote my post about it. How time flies!
- This is a big sobering slap round the face and I am hoping that by looking at it every month it will be a really good motivator to get our expenses down!
- Using the formula from my post here – (Total Savings) / (Total Savings + Total Expenses ) = £1,646.79 / (£1,646.79 +£3,060.92) = 34.98%
- Again using rules from the above post this is your net income minus spending (£781.27), plus any automatically deducted savings you make (i.e. the sharesave schemes for us), plus any tax advantaged savings, including employer match (i.e. our work retirement/pension scheme contributions). This totals up to £1646.79
Final thoughts
Naturally I’m not over the moon with 35% savings rate as this would mean nearly 24 years to FI if we kept that up as the average, when I will be 57. I guess that’s not the end of the world but I think we can do better. Also, given the fact that I’ve already quit my job I am very conscious we need to be in full lockdown savings mode for the next 6 months, as my income could well be dropping like a stone in the latter part of this year. For these reasons I will be watching our spending like a hawk… 🙂
How did you do this month? All thoughts and comments welcome as usual!
Notes:
- or any year, for that matter, seeing as they tend to not vary in name or order from year to year ↩
- When I say Net Worth here I mean income producing assets. Stocks, bonds, retirement accounts, ISAs, and the like. House not included, for now at least. I still need to work that one out! ↩
- If you are reading Mrs TFS, apologies for revealing this to the world, but remember, it’s only the practically anonymous internet init! ↩
Discussion (13) ¬
A good solid month. Particularly impressed with the low grocery spend! We usually average around £50 each week for the major shop.. with some bits inbetween so you’re far ahead of us on that.
Thanks for sharing!
Hi ER Guy!
As I mentioned we had a lot in cupboard/freezer from Xmas so we are kinda living off of past spend in a way, but even so I am happy with that. If we can come in around the same for Feb, I’ll be more confident we can keep it going at under £200/month long term.
Cheers!
Eh? dividends are income. They arrive as cash, can be spent as cash (assuming you don’t take them in a DRIP). They can’t be taken back off you or suddenly fall in value – they are cash. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…?
He he. Knew some smart aleck would pick up on that while I was writing it 😉
Seeing as I am just investing in index funds I’ve either gone for accumulating versions of the funds in which Divs are automatically reinvested, so yea you basically answered your own question.
I have also picked the “Income” version of some funds just as an experiment really to see what would happen as I am new to all of this, but on some have selected auto reinvestment anyway (bit pointless really, I guess that is exactly the same as picking an Acc fund!) and I think on one other one I will get paid them, but they are inside ISAs so I will reinvest anyway.
All of that will just appear on the Net worth column anyway so it’s still accounted for.
As the years go on and div income actually starts to create a larger portion of my income and/or I actually start drawing any as income, then I’ll add that it into the income section instead.
Hi TFS,
I haven’t left a comment on your expenses for last year, so I’ll mop it all up here.
First of all, massive respect for publicly divulging all of you income and expenses. I know first hand that it isn’t easy to do that (although you get used to it). This statement can’t be overlooked in my opinion because it’s so easy to sit back and poke holes in what you’re currently spending or earning. You have my respect sir!
As far as me expressing my opinion on them, here we go….
Your expenses seem very high across the board to me. I would generally describe your spending in line with an above average consumer. Is there anything wrong with that?! That’s down to you ultimately.
For me, in my position, I wouldn’t be happy with a 35% saving rate, but we’re two completely different people in different circumstances. As you eluded to above, that’ll mean you working until you’re 57. If you’re able to make your own money working on the side, then there is an argument you have some freedom already and you aren’t in a position like me or other ERE wannabes. WHEN I have the option to retire in 8 years, I’ll probably be delighted with saving 35% a month!
If you really want to drop your expenses down and increase your saving rate, then the good news is you have a lot of options. You have an extensive list of ‘fun stuff’ on your annual expenses so you can take your pick on what you want to eliminate altogether and what you want to drive down.
The sheer act of publicising this information made me want to question everything, and I dropped my expenses down significantly from what they were in previous years. I have no doubt that if you want to get it lower this process alone will work wonders! Can you remember when you interviewed me and asked what my Top Money Saving tip was – It was recording all income and expenses. I would take that a step further and say go one better and publicly display them on a monthly basis.
You’ve made a big step in the last two months by doing this. I’ve no doubt you’ll start seeing improvements, and getting a lot of satisfaction from doing that. All the very best with it!
Huw
Hi Huw,
Thanks for leaving such a detailed comment as usual.
I agree that our spending is in line with an above average consumer, no arguments there, and I definitely want to get the 35% rate up, escpecially over the next 6 months when I will still have a full time job. After that though, I will honest in that I’d be over the moon with 35% because I am guessing my income will drop substantially (in fact, just saving anything full stop for the first year I would count as a win, it may take time to get properly set up)!
But… as you say, I will have a lot more freedom than I do now in a full time corporate job. This is key for me and if you haven’t guessed from recent posts, I am more than happy to trade off full blown early FI for more freedom up front, right here right now.
I never really want to quit work forever anyway, as I said even in my original few posts on this very blog, I just wanted more freedom to do some other stuff when I felt like it which a 9-5+ job just does not allow. I also like the idea of being self employed in that I know if I do work my butt off, the only (or at least primary) benefactor is myself, rather than some huge corporation that pretends to but in reality couldn’t give a shit about me 🙂
Back to the point of the post though which is expenses. Yes, I am very glad I have posted this and I can see now why you said that was your top tip. It may be a slow process for us but I really think we’ll start to drive things down in the right direction over the course of this year. For the record I never posted it before not because “I was scared” or whatever, it’s just I thought it would be boring reading for most people. Hopefully I won’t lose many readers over it though 🙂
Ultimately I am hoping that even if my income is cut by (say) 40% we can still get near a 50% savings rate, but the biggest unknown is the income really. So all we can do in the meantime is drive down those expenses!
It’s going to be a bumpy ride over the next year or two that is for sure, and I may well end up having to get another 9-5 if it doesn’t work out well, in which case, I am no worse off than I am right now.
Cheers again for all the positive advice, really appreciate it mate!
TFS
Thanks for sharing, TFS.
Like you say, you’re not going to have the holiday and car maintenance expense every month and if Mrs TFS does go cold turkey on her clothes like she says, you could be looking at expenses of around £2k!
Still some ‘fat’ to trim from your social spending but I guess it’s whether you (and Mrs TFS) are willing to sacrifice any of it to bring FI closer.
Oh and I agree with Ermine – if you’re including interest from the bank as income, dividends should be classed as income too?
Good luck – I look forward to seeing your improvements as I have faith in you! 🙂
Hi weenie!
I am sure something will come up this month to whack us way over the 2K but we’ll see.
See my reply to ermine about the divs.
I am glad you have faith in me, that means a lot. Cheers!
Hi,
One question from me – how come the pension payments allocated to you and Mrs TFS are so disproportionate? Does she have a more generous workplace pension that means she doesn’t have to supplement quite as much?
Other than that I would just like to comment that quitting at 57 sounds just fine to me – another year and a bit till I would hit that particular target 🙂
Hello Cerridwen!
Good question… it’s because I earn more than her, plus my employer match is better. So my 4% (+ 4% employer match) is much greater than her 2% (+2% employer match). I count the whole amount contributed to the pension(s) as our savings, because, well, it is 🙂
So I get 8% x 50,000/12 = £300ish (actually nearer £350, I may have to check that £302 figure next month) and she gets 4% * 18500/12 = £123. Ummm…
Ok I’m really glad you asked that now as I don’t think I’ve counted the employer match for Mrs TFS! I will double check all the figures and adjust the post, and then the figures going forward.
Cheers! 🙂
I think if I could do some self employed work a la my “new plan” I would definitely be able to wait until 57 to reach full FI, but we’ll have to see how it works out I guess.
This is a fantastic spreadsheet – I’ll be giving that a go sometime this week to see how the numbers stacked up for Jan, not sure I’ll be as brave as you to share it on the blog though! Good effort overall, there is room for improvement but I think you hit the nail on the head with the row for ‘Years to FI’ …. the ultimate motivator!!
Great! Glad to hear someone might find it useful.
I see you’ve already posted up your expenses for Jan on your blog, fair play to you.
TFS