So where does our money go?

After yesterday’s post I thought I might reflect on exactly where our money has been going... It’s pretty scary! For the period of Monday April 27th until Sunday May 31st (5 full weeks) our ins and outs were:
Total Income: $10,626.33
Total Spent: $11,098.27

The reason we spend more than we earned is because we had money in the bank accounts from previous months for bills (like land rates) which are quarterly. To make this clearer, even tho our income was less than outgoings, on the 31st of May we had $319.56 sitting in our “spending” account. Also, most of our payments are fortnightly so it feels like there was an extra repayment because most things we paid for 3 times in May instead of usual 2….

The breakdown looks like this:
Water bill (quarterly) $107
Rates (quarterly) $280
Gas (2 months) $41.95
Internet & Phone $60
My mobile $62.07
His mobile $81.35 + $80 as last month’s bill was paid on the 27th of April
Dog food $104.99
Presents $100 (2x$50 vouchers)
Insurances (life, income, house) $142.65
Private Health $128.51
Car Repayment $400
Charity Donation $24
Exercise Bike repayment $26.88
Gym $74.85
Chiropractor $70.20
Clothes $189.18
Medication $26.15
Groceries $409.35
Savings $1500
Mortgage $2850
Credit Card repayments $2216.28
Other spending (eating out, socialising, movies etc) $1850.86
Wedding stuff $200

It’s a pretty big spending list for one month!

Looking at it, I’m trying to figure out the areas we could cut back on. Obviously our spending money is a big area of spending, and looking back throughout the whole year, we on average spend $185-$200 a week EACH on just stuff – so when I said yesterday that we spent $400 a week in recent weeks on just crap, it was annoying to see we’ve been doing that for a very long time, but it’s just only now starting to catch up with us. And it really is just “stuff”. Nothing essential at all. Not on anything that we’ve planned for, just stuff. Like DVD’s. Pizza with friends. *sigh* we need to be better than this! How are we ever going to get on top of it all!?

Okay. That's it. No more eating out. And no more movies until i feel we've got better control of our money. May really hurt us, with the fortnights falling in such a way that we made 3 mortgage repayments in that month but I know we can recover from it with some effort. My biggest concern is my fancy schmancy spreadsheet is currently showing that our current savings/spendings plan will find us $1,200 short on our wedding day... and I REALLY do not want to put that on our credit card, because that would mean FAILING on my first goal for 2009!

I better talk to Mr M about this tonight... it's time to get serious about this!!!

Wedding stuff and other updates

We've finally booked in our honeymoon! We're going to Vanuatu for 8 nights! 7 of those nights are at a beautiful resort called Iririki Island, and then we're spending a night on Tanna Island and doing a volcano tour, before flying back to Australia - although we're not going straight home, we're going to spend another 4 nights on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland! I can't wait... we're not spending as much as we thought we were going to, which is a massive bonus, some things ended up being cheaper than I thought they would be.

We've paid off quite a bit on wedding stuff, but still have about $15,000 to save in 5 months... there's only 4 pay-cheques for myself between now and the wedding which makes it a bit tough, meaning we pretty much need to save my entire wage, but I know we can do it - we've saved almost $15k already!

I'm going to ask Mr M to pull his belt in a bit tighter - we've really slipped lately and I looked at our spending the past few weeks and we're averaging $400 a week in "general" spending. So, not essential spending, like groceries or bills, I'm talking about 100% non-essential spending... dinners out, movies, lunches, wii games etc... not great. Really bad, in fact.

I'm going to up our "allowance" to $100 each a week but I'm going to be a lot more strict about it. I'm really determined to make our money worth more... Do you know, we've paid $55,000 towards our mortgage since we moved in, but the actual reduction in principle is only $10,000. Wow. Pretty heart breaking really...

I was also devastated to receive my HECS (equivalent to a Student Loan) statement the other day and see that even tho I paid $3400 in the last financial year my total debt only reduced by $2000. I feel like this is a debt I'll never repay, and I don't even include in our "debt" statement because I've always considered it unimportant as I automatically pay it like tax, so it means so little...but when I saw that statement I realised I'm going to have to start paying extra towards it otherwise it'll never be gone!! At this rate, it will take me about 15 years to pay it back, and that's 15 years of working - what happens when I stop working to have children?? God, I don't want to think about. But one thing I should consider is that every voluntary repayment I make over $500 actually reduces my debt by an extra 10%.... So if I make a voluntary repayment of $1000, my debt will actually reduce by $1100.... there's some incentive for me!

Once the wedding is over, at the beginning of 2010 I will put together a new debt statement that will include my HECS debt. The only way to ensure I am fully focused and dedicated to eliminating my debt is to be really honest about how much I've got!!! I'll also have to rethink my long term goals... I wanted to pay my car off next year, but with our plans to go to europe and now that I want to include payments towards my HECS debt, it might not happen, but I will definitely make sure I keep making extra repayments towards the car!

I know a lot of you would be wondering why we're having long honeymoon or planning to go to europe whilst we have so much consumer debt, and I suppose the answer is time... we've got the rest of our lives to repay debt but only a couple of years of opportunity to travel. We've solemnly sworn that we will not accrue any extra debt by travelling - it has to be money we've saved up and above our debt repayments. It's not the ideal situation to be in, but it's the one we've chosen, and we are happy with this decision.

End of May Update

Don't have time to do the full update, we are SO busy at the moment!
But the quick update is:

Total Debt is now $293,598.46, down from $294,237.64 which means we reduced our total debt by $639.18. This is not much.... Mostly because we're in the midst of building a pergola and there are lots of things on credit cards which will be paid off before it starts accruing interest so hopefully next month should see quite a big drop!! So this month our credit card debt actually went UP! We started on June with $22,013.93 and now we have $23,008.44 which means an increase of $994.51.

My birthday was also in May, so I got some nice pressies from the hubby-to-be and furry babies, so no doubt I will see a bill with my own birthday presents on there soon! (Doesn't that just ruin the charade!!!) We also went on a big night out on the town, PLUS we went and saw Pink over the weekend, which ended up being a pricey evening out as well!

Anyway, will report more later. Got a heap of stuff to do, more decluttering to get done tonight, not to mention the cleaning that got neglected over the weekend - our shower is disgraceful!