I’m not going to lie the budget got away from me in August and I ended the month not really knowing what had gone where and why, so I am glad to be starting September with a new set of numbers and a renewed focus – we are getting back on track 💪
Last Monday I went back to work after 5 months on furlough, it was a bit of a shock let me tell you! I was fairly certain I was looking at redundancy (which is why I had been working so hard on building my side hustle income up) so to get an email saying my furlough leave had ended with immediate effect and I was expected back at my desk on Monday morning threw things into disarray for a few days whilst I worked out how on earth I was going to manage everything.
Being back at work means we have a lot more wiggle room in the budget from now on so we can get back on track with our financial goals and start making some decent headway again.
We get paid at the end of each month so Septemebers budget, which is filled from Augusts payday, will still be feeling some of the effects of furlough pay…does that make sense?
Septembers budget is done 👍
I set the next months budget a few days before the start of the month so this screenshot of YNAB was actually taken on the 30th August and the scary looking red figure at the top shows our projected outgoings for the month.
I’m aware it looks very high but I’m anticipating putting a lot towards savings this month and hopefully being able to top it up with my side hustle income too.
Rethinking our goals
We have not made very much progress on our goals over the past few months – COVID and stress around the whole furlough, possible redundancy, the world is imploding was mainly to blame but now that life feels a bit more settled I’m ready to start tackling them again.
House Deposit
This is my biggest stress at the moment, the house deposit/stamp duty costs/whatever it is we’re actually going to need to buy this house. I need to write a post on our whole house buying situation as its a bit of a convoluted story but the main thing to note is that we thought we were pretty much sorted when it came to deposits (as we are getting a gifted deposit from my parents because we’ve paid over £70k to them in rent the past 6 years whilst living in the house we’re going to buy…I promise I’ll explain it soon!)and we just had to cover stamp duty and legal fees but then COVID hit and everything went a bit wrong.
Deposit amounts needed have risen meaning that we’d need to save more towards the deposit to top it up to get a decent rate, everyone was excitedly telling me how stamp duty holiday would help us out but the benefits of that are negated by the need for a bigger deposit now…Oh and add to that the fact that we thought I might get made redundant so wouldn’t have enough income to show for the mortgage applications……to be honest, I’ve not really wanted to think much about deposits and mortgages this past 6 months as it’s just been a bit of a headache and I didn’t know what we were going to do.
Last week I got taken off of furlough and I’m now back at work full-time so at least we don’t have to worry about redundancy now AND we’ve gone back to having a normal budget again, this means I’ve finally got some headspace and can seriously start looking at what the plan is going forward. I’ve been playing around with some online mortgage calculator tools and I think I’ve got a good idea of where we’re aiming for now.
I’m bumping our goal up to £10k for the Mortgage and Deposit costs
Baby Step 3 – Fully Funded Emergency Fund
I’ll be honest this is a step I’m really struggling with, all of our savings and sinking funds are held in our Starling Bank account and at the moment we are having to prioritise our saving for the mortgage over everything else – I know this goes against the order of the baby steps but if anything major did happen and we didn’t have enough in our Emergency Fund to cover it then we would just take what was needed from the mortgage savings pot. Ideally, I’d like to get BS3 savings up to £6,000 but for the time being we will be drip-feeding this account with £300 a month until we have got our mortgage sorted.
How is your budget looking for September?
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