Hold onto your hats!  Money has been literally flying out the door this month!

This is a good example of why we save.

January – $5,144.53
February – $1,783.49
March – $4,350.56
April – $2,385.31
May – $5,961.54
June – $2,939.07
July – $3,537.09
August – $3,601.19
September – $9,406.95

It was certainly no surprise to see that we had parted with almost $10,000.00 of our hard-earned cash in September.

As I mentioned last month, we headed to Singapore for a week and while we had already paid for our airfares and accommodation earlier in the year all of our other spending is included in a lump sum of $1,644.37 for the week.  This comprised of spending on transport, sightseeing, admission costs, groceries, alcohol and eating out as well as a dress for myself and a birthday gift.  We decided not to try to separate it into categories as it was all spent while we were on holidays.  If you are interested you can see the full breakdown of the holiday spending here.

There were 2 other major expenses in September.

The first was $3,050 for a deposit on a hybrid battery system for our solar panels.  There will be significant additional expense for this project sometime in the next month or so.  This is a substantial upfront cost but we believe that it will be a worthwhile long-term investment that will save us even more money and allow a degree of independence from the power grid.  The detail will be forthcoming in a future blog post.

The second large outlay of money was in the holiday category as we have booked our return airfares to Chicago for next year.  I have been watching the release of airfares for 2016 and the pricing and decided that the time was right to secure fares available for the dates and times that we wanted to travel.  Once again, there will be more details about that on my holiday blog.  I hope to get a post written today.

However, on the spending upside, we only spent $55.89 on food for the entire month.  Apart from a modest amount of fruit and vegetables as well as milk and cheese, we simply ate what we had available from the refrigerator, freezer, pantry and garden.  I did not necessarily set out to minimise our spending on food and it was really more about not having the time or inclination to shop as well as being away for a week.  It is good to know that we have plenty to sustain us if the need arises.