It was a bit of a struggle for me to get my head around this months budget. The realisation is starting to hit us that my job may not be as safe as we first thought, I’m still on furlough at the moment and I’ve been told to be on ‘stand-by’ to potentially go back next week but based on the workload they’ve currently got in the workshop I don’t think it’s likely to happen.
They have also made some redundancies in other parts of the business – they were for completely different tasks to the work we do, they are office-based and we are physically fixing things in the workshop, but it still seems sensible to entertain the fact that I might not go back to work.
Let’s get something out the way first…
Should we have been taking this seriously as a potential outcome as soon as this all happened/when I went on furlough 3 months ago? Yes probably
Do we feel stupid for not doing so and not keeping to a stricter budget before this? Well yes and no.
Work is still saying there isn’t anything to worry about, which I agree with to an extent (as long as the government furlough scheme is running then there isn’t really any reason to let staff go, that’s the whole idea of it) but if the workload doesn’t pick up by the time the furlough scheme ends then it’ll mean the company has to look at where they can save money. Less work = less technicians needed = redundancies
Ok enough waffle, lets look at what we’re working with
Julys budget is done 👍
The reason this months budget was a bit late being done was that I just didn’t have the headspace for it – I was having some major corona overwhelm this past week and trying to juggle my side hustle workload and day to day other bits was a bit of a struggle.
I’m working on trying to tackle this and one thing I’m going to do going forward is to set up my YNAB budget completely differently to how it is now to make it more automated each month so that it’s one less thing (or at least a smaller task) for me to do.
At the moment I manually input each ‘budgeted’ cost but, for the bills that I know are going to be the same each month, I should be setting them up as a repeated expense so that it means half of my budget is automatically done for me each month.
I’ve not done a zero-based budget this month because I want to go through and double-check a few things with subscriptions and make sure I’ve allocated enough for some other budget lines, hopefully it’ll be closer to being zero based by mid-month.
Pressing pause on Mortgage Costs/House Deposit savings
One of the biggest changes we’re making this month is changing where we are funnelling most of our savings, for the past few months the majority of our savings have been going towards our mortgage costs (not to be confused with a house deposit, we are only saving towards mortgage costs at the moment as our housing situation is a bit different to the norm and part of our deposit is already sorted), once we had the mortgage costs covered we would have then been looking to organise a mortgage or save more towards the deposit.
Now that Covid has affected the housing market, mortgage rates and the fact that we aren’t 100% sure about how secure my job is we might not be able to buy the house in the same time frame that we had originally been planning to. We’ve decided to pause saving for the mortgage and instead direct savings more towards our BS3 fully-funded emergency fund.
Now, the silly thing is…it technically doesn’t matter…
…all of our savings – BS1 starter emergency fund, Sinking Funds, Mortgage Costs savings are all in the same bank account and separated by Starlings pot system. If the sh!t did hit the fan and we had to find money from somewhere to live off of, we could, it’s all there with immediate access anyway. The reason we are doing it this way is because Dave told me to do it it will help us to feel more secure…and when I say ‘us’ I mean me, as far as Dean is concerned the money is going into savings the same as it always was and it’s just in a different pot now 😂
Personal Finance is 80% behavior and only 20% head knowledge – Dave Ramsey
Getting ‘Gazelle Intense’ about Baby Step 3/Fully Funded Emergency Fund
So, for the next few months at least you’ll be seeing me colour in this savings chart (it’s cute isn’t it? Want you’re own one? Sign-up to my newsletter and you’ll get access to whole host of free printables)
I’m setting our 3 months FFEF target as £6,000 for now, that feels manageable for the moment it works out that each little square to colour in is worth £60.
I’m going to be getting gazelle intense with my side hustles and also look more closely as to where I can trim the budget so that I can start colouring these in asap. I think I might colour the squares I complete with side hustles earnings in a different colour to the ones we fill with the budgeted savings 🤓
How is your budget looking for July? Have you made any big changes to it during the lockdown?
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