january update – expenses, income, and battling a cream tea addiction

Feb12
by TFS on February 12, 2016 at 9:32 am
Posted In: Budgets, Personal Finance, TFS Updates

january update

In January, Oi av’ mostly been eatin’ ….

 

Despite being half way through another stint of my 2 weeks off, time is shorter than ever so I am going to keep this one as brief as possible! The good news is there isn’t much to talk about on the expenses side of things which means:

A) This post will be shorter than average!

B) We didn’t spend all that much 🙂

All in all we managed a savings rate of 46.22% which I am mega chuffed with. I know January is normally pretty easy because, well, no one really even ventures out of their houses let alone is inviting you out to the local casino and strip joint, but I am still impressed with our frugal start to the year.

I’ve updated my spreadsheet with new Expenses and Net Worth tabs for 2016 and tied these up into a new 2016 summary in the Net Worth & Savings Rate Summary tab. You can check it out here and remember you can just copy this to your own Google Drive and then edit away to your hearts content!

expenses

january expenses

We spent a total of £2151.65 in January, which is the second lowest spend month we’ve ever had since we started tracking it! BOOM!

The weird thing is it didn’t even feel like we we’re being all that frugal and kept ourselves more than busy throughout the month. Weird how things like that work out, huh? Or maybe not.

Some headlines figures (a much shorter section than usual, yay 🙂 ):

  • Groceries £209 – A solid start to the year here.
  • Charity £80 – I felt a bit guilty at the amount we’ve given to charity over the last few years so had a bit of a splurge this month and will try to keep it at a respectable level throughout the year!
  • Parking £13 – It’s not much but we keep on getting booked into having lots of scans for Mrs T’s pregnancy, so I can see this being even more in the next couple of months! Bloomin’ hospital car parks! 1
  • Children £57 – To keep things simple I am just lumping everything baby related into one spending category. I don’t really care if it’s baby clothes, a car seat, or breast pads, if it is something that we wouldn’t have bought if we didn’t have a baby, it is getting lumped into this category. We’ve already got TONNES and I mean tonnes of stuff for free off of friends and family, and most of it looks brand new anyway. Especially the clothes, as babies tend to grow out of stuff after about 3 uses, the cheeky little cherubs. So we are pretty much set but needed a few extra bits “just in case”. Plus there are some things you just don’t really want  second hand (hello breast pump!?) 🙂
  • DIY £123 – A few bits left over from the bathroom refit (still not 100%, so you’ll have to wait for the final pics, sorry!) plus the kitchen refit is now underway so I think there are a few bits needed for this on there.
  • Furniture £44 – Now this was a good one. We managed to get a nice set of drawers for the baby room for £21 and a lovely solid wood bookcase to replace our horrible crappy old Argos chipboard one 2 for just £23 – both off of eBay. We used Goofbid to snipe the items but it was probably not that needed as there wasn’t much interest in either anyway, but it’s a great tool so check it out if you haven’t heard of it before. Anyway Kudos to Mrs T for finding these bargains! The only snag was they were collection only so we had to hire a van and I went up to collect both on the same day, bringing the total spent to around £90. Still… worked out great VFM!
  • Dining & Drinking £25.83 – LOL! We are officially old and boring! Joking of course, we’ve just been busy doing other stuff, although it certainly was nice to have a few Friday nights in with the little lady 🙂

 

income

Total income was £3581 which consisted of £3298 standard salary and £283 of other income. Not bad!

Points of note:

  • Mrs T’s salary – £1311 – This is £250 higher than normally stated because we’ve pulled out of the Share Save scheme at her work. Seeing as the market has tanked I think we are better of pulling it out and investing that money into some index funds.
  • Solar Panel FIT payment – £56
  • Top Cash Back – £33
  • Gambling – £125 – not matched betting FYI, I have only just started that in February

net worth

Our Net Worth unsurprisingly took a hit in January and we ended up with:

Excluding house equity: £96,946 / -£1,201 / -1.22%

Including house equity: £168,342 / -£819 / -0.48%

 

other updates

As the “going out” figure probably alludes to above I smashed my alcohol target this month with 5.6 units/week. This is, laughably, less than last year when I was attempting to do “Dry January”… haha!

My running goals were going well but the recent windy weather has made it hard to gauge how fast I am running. Needless to say running into a 50mph headwind means you don’t run as fast!!! I also didn’t figure in that I’d be doing the kitchen refit the week before the first half marathon, and my legs are killing from lifting lot’s of stuff about. So bottom line is that I’m not feeling all that confident of hitting the tough goals I set out, but I sure as hell will give it my best shot!

Apart from that the only real point of interest from the blog point of view was that I started to look into making my own dishwasher detergent but have since been sidetracked on other more important stuff (kitchen and trying to clear out the house for impending baby!!). When I get back on it I will report back findings… 🙂

 

Finally as the title and main picture alludes to, I somehow got addicted to cream teas during the month 🙂

As in I was eating one every other day 😐

I am over it now though and without a trip to the priory! Phew!

 

How was your dark, wet and windy January?! Did you stick to your resolutions and overcome your addictions, newly discovered or otherwise?! 🙂

Notes:

  1. And before anyone says it, no I am not going to be the one to suggest to a heavily pregnant woman that we park a mile away to save a few quid on parking 🙂 ↩
  2. I seriously hated that bookshelf, just ask Mrs T! The shelves bent when you put books on it FFS!!! I have no idea how I put up with it for nearly 7 years! ↩
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