I don’t know where this month has gone! I also feel like I don’t know where our money has gone this month, I’ve really taken my eye off the ball lately, it’s not caused any disasters but it’s probably prevented some wins in terms of paying off debt.
Here is our Budget Report for July 2018
These are all fairly self-explanatory costs but I’m going to explain some of the higher ones as.
You will notice that all these numbers are in $ instead of £’s this is because I use the EveryDollar website to do my budget and it’s meant for the US and Canada, the numbers are all the same so you can just ignore the $ prefix.
Income
Rollover, Charlotte/Dean, Everyday Rewards – If you want to know a bit more about these you can have a look at my first Budget Report
Side hustles – Although this has been a very busy month for me with BangOnBlanks the work wont translate into money just yet. I’ve not had much time to spend on the blog at all (as you can tell from the severe lack of posts in July!) or BebeMakes. I say to Natalie every month that this will be the month we find a better balance and its not happened yet, I’m hopeful it’ll happen soon though. Anyway, here is a breakdown of this month side hustle income;
Blog – £37.50 Just shows that you have to work at a blog to make an income from it and my lack of time this month has caused a big dent in blog earrings. I also had around £100 worth of expenses this month.
BebeMakes – £50
BangonBlanks – £300
eBay – £40 (I don’t do reselling on eBay but Natalie and my Mum do so every few months I give them a box or bag of stuff to list and they take a cut from the profit as their fee)
Housing
OVO – I’m in the process of switching to a cheaper energy supplier but have had a bit of a hiccups as our current meters are set to a commercial profile (it reads half hourly to give more accurate data for the supplier apparently) and that takes a few weeks to fix typically.
EE – I moved to a new phone number this month, Yay! But EE also messed up removing my old phone number, Boo! So who knows what the phone bills will look like for the next few months until it gets sorted!
Envelopes
I really need to get back on the ball with our envelope spending! I’ve not been using cash the past few months and it’s really shown in the numbers, I think getting on top of this will be one of my August Goals.
Groceries – This is my biggest bug bear on this months budget. Too many top up shops and not enough planning was the issue, I’ve got an idea to remedy it going forward though – keep an eye out for a post.
Misc – Birthdays, Electricals (Fans!) , Family Meal to celebrate birthdays. I should have planned better in hindsight.
Lifestyle
Cleaner – Someone asked why this fluctuates month on month before and I forgot to answer, sorry! It varies because Anita comes and cleans every Monday, depending on how the days of the month fall we sometimes have 5 Mondays instead of 4 in one month. She also does ironing for us every now and then which is charged at different amounts.
Netflix – I found out that there are higher tiers of Netflix the other day! A reader emailed me asking how I get Netflix so cheap as she pays more for it each month. Turns out you can pay more for an Ultra HD package and if you want to watch it on more than 1 device at time.
Insurance & Tax
Car Tax – I’m not sure why we pay this monthly, I need to contact DVLA to see if we can change it to yearly ideally.
Debt
Barclaycard – Only paid just over the minimum this month.
Zopa – This is the standard monthly minimum payment.
Savings
These are our Sinking Funds, they stay pretty much set at the same amount every month – have a look at my first Budget Report for a bit more info.
Emergency Fund – I put some more into the EF this month as August is set to be a bit of a rough month money wise due to a change in pay days, I’m pretty sure we’re going to need to use that £350 and possibly even go into the EF as I’m struggling to get the numbers to add up!
Rollover
Our payday at work isn’t until the 15th so this ‘Rollover’ amount is what needs to be left in the account at the end of the month to cover the payments coming out until the 15th of the next month. This is the last month we will have this category as our new pay day is the 30th of each month (starting August 30th) so I can finally have a true 1st of the month budget, it’s sad how excited I am about this!
Gym
Floor Mats – We didn’t’ go for expensive flooring in the gym, just some mega cheap laminate (…which I am now regretting, but that’s another story) but we had to buy some floor protection for under the weights area. We look at those jigsaw tiles you can find all over the internet and they weren’t going to cut it but luckily we found a very local supplier to us who deals with rubberized flooring and they recommended rubber stable matting as it was great value for money and hard-wearing. We might actually end up buying some more of this for some other areas in the gym but it’s not in the budget at the moment.
Misc – I’m going to be honest and say that I can’t fully remember what this includes, it was spent in the first few days of the month and I didn’t make a note! I’m going to hazard a guess at it being for some more filler, the TV bracket and a clock though.
Can you tell me why your life insurance is so low? My wife and I pay a total of £160 per month……
Nope not really! I think it very much depends upon age/health/line of work and how much you’re insured for. We don’t have any dependents and aren’t insured for millions, by the time we are worth a million we will be self-insured so for now we just cover to around 10x our income.