Here is my final post about tracking our spending for 2015.

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
October – $7,490.03
November – $15,707.97
December – $4,821.34

December was a more reasonable figure with no huge items like the previous few months.  There was a bit of additional spending with the silly season taking its toll.

On my spreadsheet I have the spending divided into various categories.

The category with the highest spend was the all-encompassing ‘House and Garden’.  This was mainly due to the installation of additional solar panels and a hybrid battery system.  Nevertheless, after putting that cost aside, it is evident that we do spend quite a bit in this category.  However, many of these expenses are one-off things which we will not have to purchase again for many years – if at all.

‘Holidays’ was also quite high as we paid for and took a holiday to Singapore, paid for flights, long-distance train fares and some accommodation for our USA/Canada trip in July 2016 and made several domestic trips for family reasons.

‘Transport’ was our next highest cost and this is our train fares for a fairly long commute.  There is not a lot we can do to change this until we retire.

We spent an average of $93/week on groceries which includes food, cleaning items and toiletries.  I am going to try to reduce this a bit this year.  Growing more of our own food should make a difference.

Entertainment and dining out also made up a substantial chunk of our spending with an average of just over $60/week.  This includes meals, films, theatre and shows.  I plan to reduce the spur of the moment eating out and hopefully reign in the spending in this category.

I have not detailed every category but the other 2 where we averaged greater than $50/week were clothing (combined for GMan and I) and petrol/maintenance for our 2 cars.  I expect that the clothing spend will be somewhat less this year but the car costs will be about the same.

Tracking our spending has been an eye-opening exercise which I will continue in 2016.  I will not be posting monthly tallies but I will do a review at the end of 2016 and compare it to 2015.

Is there such a thing as a normal month?  Every month we seem to have expenses that are not repeated in any other month.  I guess that is why I chose the exercise of tracking our spending over a 12 month period.  Hopefully, I can gain some general idea when it is averaged over the whole year.

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
October – $7,490.03

More than half of our spending ($4,300 in fact) for October was on upfront payments related to our overseas trip in 2016.  We have paid for over a week of accommodation as well as train and ferry fares.

On the home front, food accounted for $273, I bought 2 pairs of summer sandals which set me back $330 while the somewhat broad category of ‘House and Garden’ continues to be a bottomless pit when it comes to spending.  Does anyone else find that this is the case?

This has certainly been an eye-opening exercise and when the full year is complete I will add in the regular costs such as insurances, rates and so on to get an overall figure for our spending for the year.  I have a feeling that it will be fairly scary.

Another month has flown by and time to review what we spent.

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

I was a little surprised at how much we spent this month but when I examined the categories it was interesting to note that ‘House & Garden’ which is often a substantial amount was only $24.50 in August.  However, we made up for it in other ways – routine service for the car, major dental work for GMan, new sandals for Gman, a couple of items of clothing for me and a bulk purchase of dog food.  We also had visitors and so naturally we spent more on entertaining and also petrol but I would not have it any other way.

The average monthly discretionary spending for the first 8 months of the year is $3712.

September will be an interesting month for spending as we are heading to Singapore for a week during the month.  Airfares, accommodation and travel insurance have all been accounted for earlier in the year so our spending will be limited to transport, food, admission costs and anything that we buy while we are there.  More on that at the end of the month.

We have started the new financial year with plenty of spending but when you look at it over the longer term it is just under the monthly average for 2015.

So, what did we spend our money on?  Unlike some other months, there was no spending on gifts or travel.  The category of ‘House & Garden’ continues to to be where much of our discretionary spending goes.  In July we bought our new desk for the home office and at the end of the month we replaced the microwave which died.  ‘Food’ was almost $700 as we stocked up on supplies in July and petrol was higher as I drove to Brisbane a bit more to spend time with my mother.  We spent $320 on clothing as we ordered several items of knitwear for both GMan and myself.

Here are the totals for the first 7 months of 2015:

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

You need to remember that this is only our variable spending and does not include mortgage, rates, phone, internet, insurances or any other fixed costs.

The total for the first 7 months is $26,101.59 at an average of $3,729.00 per month.

I am starting to see some patterns emerge and these will be discussed in more detail later in the year.

It is important not to forget the reason for this tracking exercise.  I wanted to see how much we spend and on what so that we could better understand what our actual financial needs would be in our retirement.  Our plans to leave the paid workforce are still a few years away but preparation is a necessary part of that if we are to be able to live according to our means.

Another month over and I have totalled up the spending for May.  It is not a pretty sight.  Almost $6,000 gone this month in variable spending.  Yikes!!

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.