Monthly expense report: October

I am pretty happy with my expenses for October. Not because how much I spend but on what I spend it. Below are the general numbers and then let’s dive in the details of my spending.

Income : 2 225,80 euro

Expenses : 1 531,70 euro

Savings : 694,10 euro or 31,18%

Income

Income was my regular paycheck from work. With the exception of my end of year bonus income will remain like this for at least a couple of months. But, and this is the exciting step, I did finally started ( a little bit) on the side gig. It only took me almost a full year. Sometimes I am really not happy with my own lazyness …

Expenses

Let’s get the boring stuff out of the way first.

I had my fixed amount of 1 100 euro  to deposit in our joint account as I do each month.

Food during working days was 81 euro. And I am really annoyed about it because I could have stayed below budget If I just had controlled my appetit a bit more.

Mobile phone cost me 14,20 euro because I made a few calls out of my bundle. I currently pay 12 euro a month for 2 giga of data and 150 min calling time. There is a 10 euro one which gives you 1 GB of data and with working form home and using Wi-FI a lot this should probably cover my data use. But with the 2 GB I know I will not run out and frankly that piece of mind is worth the 2 euro for me. Since we in Belgium have entered a new lockdown it might be smart for some of you to check if your mobile phone subscription still matches with your changed needs …

Gas for the Vespa was 8,5 euro because working from home most days …

I spend 44 euro on 2 t-shirts. Because sometimes I push my hobo dress style a bit too much and my girlfriends patience with it runs out.

A grand total of 8 euro was spend sending a registered letter to the Belgian tax office as we are in dispute over some income. Once resolved it will make for an interesting blog post. For now I try to not be annoyed by it. Even with fines the max they can charge me is around 400 euro. My aim is to not have to pay this. But if I do have to pay them I am making sure it will have cost them more in man hours. Victory by attrition!

And then, finally, the fun stuff!

I spend 25 euro to go see Robert Henk’s CBM 8032 AV show and some drinks afterwards. With the new lockdown now in effect I am really happy with this spending. Some entertainment out of the house! Seeing people! Yeah!!

110 euro was spend on some extra weights. And with weights I mean these kind of weights:

I finally was able to buy some extra weights for my exercise equipment! I had been looking since mid August. I also bought extra 1,25 kg and 0,5 kg weights and those were actually the hardest to find. With the gyms having closed in March – April and afterwards all kind off restictions it seems quit a lot of people have started working out at home. My health/exercises deserve their own post but here to I have been a bit too lazy. I used the not having weights as an excuse where I could have ramped up the repetitions more. But now that I have the weights I either increase the weight or add a few more repetitions to at least 1 exercise. That way I make some progress every week. It may not be a lot but just as with savings, over several months all those little improvements start adding up!

Another 106 euro was spend on various little things that should make this second lockdown a bit more bearable. I promise, none of it was spend on steam games!

And then, 37 euro was spend on hosting and domain name transfer. My side gig will be an online gig. And a first step was to get the necessary web space.

The enthusiast package over at one.com gets me 200 GB of space and as an extra bonus the possibility to have 5 seperate websites. This means I can put this blog, my girlfriends DJ site and my project all at the same spot which is cheaper than having it all on seperate accounts. And for me as an European one.com is easier to use than my previuos USA hosting of this blog (tech suport in dutch, whoop, whoop!). So the 37 euro is a small amount but it got me really excited as it is the first step in getting my side project started!