Hello all,
This month I did a detailed spending diary for the first time ever, just to get an overview of what is going on. OK, so July is not over yet, but it is pretty close and all I have to do now is put about £20 of petrol in the car to take me to a job I am doing far away over the weekend.
So how did it go? Well I spent £237.48. More than I wanted, but with a couple of unavoidable extras.
Here is the breakdown anyway:
£17 Dentist
£63.90 grocery shopping (pretty damned good, if I say so myself)
£50 Travel expenses (unavoidable)
£19.53 Toiletries (will explain why it is so high)
£2 A coffee at the airport (well sometimes you have to)
£40.90 Books
£2.90 Laundry
£25.85 Luxery items, including one night out
£2.40 Birthday cards
£13 some new kitchen equiptment.
All in all not a bad month, considering that £17 was for the dentist and £50 was for travel. OK, so my weakness is for books (although at least this is money well spent as they were all second hand, all will be read and 2 of them were for presents. The luxery items was not what I considered excessive although it did gall me that £17 of it was for one round of 4 drinks in a London pub, wow, what sort of price is that!
So room for improvement lies in perhaps a little less enthusiastic book shopping and perhaps some visits to the library. I am pretty thrilled to find my grocery shopping bill so low, although, to be fair, I was working away from home for some of this month and food was provided on the job, so that is not necessarily a fair view of how much I would normally spend on food.
It was a bit of bind writing everything in when I spent it but certainly made me realise where my money is going. I won't do it again in August, because I am working away from home for such a lot of the month, but maybe I will repeat the experiment in September when I am home much more.
Oh and the toiletries was high, because I bought some stuff to make my own with, an initial spend, but should last a long long time.
Oh what a great idea. I've never thought about doing that:( I will start a journal for the month of August. Books and DVD's are also my weakness. At the moment Amazon UK has free postage to Oz so I've been ordering quite a lot and with the exchange rate being so good, what else could I do! Wish we had Amazon here. It's no wonder pubs are closing down at those prices. Looking forward to your post on making your own toiletries:) Linda
ReplyDeleteIf it's of any help, this is the nifty little website help I had with my spending diary:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.spendingdiary.com/
Cheers, have just signed up ready for Monday:)
ReplyDeleteGood idea to tally all the expenses up, once in a while.
ReplyDeleteI`ve just spent £70 on groceries, toiletries and sundries for one week. This will feed and stock us up again, also sorts out 3 of us, as my partners son has moved back with us for a while. His expenses are far higher than ours as he is not even worried about eating some junk foods and spends his money on a lot of sweets. When there were only the two of us we would never spend more than £40 to keep us well stocked.
It`s monthly bill paying tomorrow. This means £115 for Polltax, £10 for Gas, £40 for Electric, £32 for Water Rates, and £350 for our rent on the council house. And we still manage to save a little. I`m paying £200 into our savings account each month. This is our little buffer for emergencies. If it`s not used it will build up for the next holiday. Every little bit helps.
You asked for ways you can make cuts I count at least 67 pounds here totally unnecessary spending..
ReplyDeleteAnonymous, you are quite right, and that is the reason for doing a spending diary for a month, so you can see the cold, hard truth about where your money goes and learn from it.
ReplyDeleteWould you like to borrow my four colour pen?
ReplyDelete