tracking spending | organised castle

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.

It is a few days into April and you could be forgiven for thinking that I had forgotten this series. But no, I am just running a little late.

Here are the monthly totals so far:

January – $2,628.73
February – $1,783.49
March – $4,320.56

Well March really blew the averages! What did we spend our money on?

The blowout in our March spending has highlighted the precise reason why I wanted to track our spending for a whole year. I knew that our variable spending was very patchy.

One example is the category “Pets/Vet/Registration”. Our combined total for January and February for this category was $43 yet in March it was $673. The dog had his annual check-up and annual heartworm medication, we bought 2 large bags of dog food, chicken feed and a fancy chicken feeder which will hopefully save us money in the long run by not allowing other wildlife to access the feed.

Food was also higher due due some bulk buying of nuts and dried fruit.