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!!!