Over the weekend I finalised the figures for our April spending.
Here are the totals so far:
January – $2,628.73
February – $1,783.49
March – $4,320.56
April – $2,384.46
Now that I have 4 months of spending recorded I decided to extrapolate that to a 12 month period and came up with $33,351.72 which is rather high considering that is only our variable expenses and does not include the mortgage, rates, insurances etc. I then took out the holiday costs and redid my calculations which presented a more realistic figure of $24,832.32 for the year. Finally, I excluded our public transport costs and our variable spending dropped to $18,340.32 when averaged over the year. The reason I tried excluding the public transport costs is that these are entirely associated with going to work and would not be relevant in a post-retirement budget.
This is certainly proving to be an interesting exercise to see where the money actually goes.
organised castle 
I’ve been tracking my spending using an app on my iPhone for about four years. It’s super helpful to see trend lines and to more clearly understand where my money is going. Good luck!
I agree that it is an excellent reminder on just where the money goes. Otherwise, it is very easy to let it slip through your fingers.
Fairy,I’m doing the same to see what it would cost me to retire also, but I’m including holidays in as I intend to have them when I’m retired, we love cruising as it’s a relaxing and easy way to go places, definitely suitable for retirees.
We are definitely factoring in holidays but I just did not want to multiply the $2,500 we have spent on flights and accommodation to Singapore when averaging out the costs to an annualised figure. In our retirement calculations we have factored in $10,000 per year for holidays. I suspect some years will be more but others will be less.