After two incredible months with a 73% and 54% savings rate I spend decided to spend a lot of money in July which had my savings rate drop to 8,8%. Here are the numbers.

Income: 2 382 euro

Expenses: 2 171,80 euro

Savings: 210,20 euro or a measely 8,8%

Income

Not much to tell about the income in July. Only the normal monthly salary this month. Bonusses, unfortunately do not come every month 🙁

Expenses

Personal spending was pretty normal. I did spend 50 euro visiting the festivities at Ghent. Since we used to live in Ghent their annual festivities is always a good excuse to meet up with old friends. The girlfriend usually stays with some of those friends as there are many, many parties to attend during these 10 days.

So where did I do spend all the extra money on? Simple, on a gift for the girlfriend.

Our gift policy as a couple is pretty basic: we don’t exchange gifts. Both of us prefer to have less stuff than more stuff. And if we want something it is usually something pretty specific. Which means you better ask us exactly what we want instead of just buying it. Also, if we want a specific something we, after carefull considering if we really want it, most of the time we buy it. Which means that when a birthday or holiday comes around there is nothing we want. So we stopped exchanging gifts a long time ago. We do try, and do not save, on trying to spend quality time with each other. But that is usually a joint expense.

Why the gift now?

Because the girfriend on occasion often doubts herself too much. She has been a big music/techno fan since her youth. But this was always passive: listening to music, going to parties. Which had me often wondering why she never did anything with it as it cleary did bring her much joy. Now I know, it is not because you like something you need to actively do something with it but we are speaking about a pretty obsessive passion here. It also became clear that she didn’t do something with it, not because she didn’t want to but because of to much self-doubt. The ‘what if I suck at it’ fear. I don’t think our talking resolved the self doubt, but she did come to the conclusion that the only real downside of trying was some wasted time (not that big a deal since we would otherwise spend it watch TV shows, nothing wrong with netflix by the way 😉 and a couple of hundred euro’s on DJ gear. Most of it we probably could recuperate by selling the gear. Or we could just keep it and really improve the sound quality of our little home parties.

So once convinced she would try her hand at Dj’ing another difference between our personalities showed itself. The girlfriend is, in my mind, slow to act. Now I am a big fan of taking once time to gather all the relevant inforation and such but for me, once the decision is taken you go for it. No more waiting, no more delays, no more what ifs but go, go, go. And the girlfriend was taking her goddamn sweet time! Talking about december where she and a few friends might take some DJ lessons and then only buying the equipment after…. Given the avalanche of youtube clips that can show you everything you ever wanted to know about DJ’ing and the fact we actually have two DJ’ing friends I found all her justifications for not diving in complete nonsens. So I did a deep dive into the world of DJ gear and emerged a week later with a big order at the bax music shop and 826 euro less in my account.

What 826 euro gets you is this:

1 Denon DJ MC4000 DJ-controller, 2 KRK RP5 G3 active studiomonitors, 1 Audio Technica ATH-M40x headphone

She did wait to buy a laptop and first hooked the set-up to our desktop computer. Something which made for a very full desk. Once she discovered she actually liked dJ’ing she did buy a laptop and I spend a Saturday afternoon constructing a somewhat rude but perfectly usable DJ table. Which now makes for a pretty full living room …