Monthly expense report : Februari

Februari was a cheap and expensive month all rolled into one. Cheap because I hardly bought anything at all. Expensive because I did spend a lot of money. How is the possible? Full explication is below, but first the numbers:

Income: 2 677,55 euro

Expenses: 1 962,20 euro

Savings: 715,35 euro or 26,72%

Income:

With almost 2 000 euro in expenses my savings rate for March was saved by the income side.

2 177,55 euro of income was from work and an extra 500 euro was a gift from the parents. When they heard I was planning on buying an extra piece of exercise equipment they offered to pay a big chunk of it. Read the expenses to find out what exactely I bought.

Expenses:

Once again I transferred 1 100 euro to our joint account (mortgage, utilities, joint grocery shopping …)

Extra food was 46 euro. Helped by a short month and working from home I didn’t eat that much extra! Actualy lost a little bit of weight and no that was not due to the exercise equipment I bought!

Mobile phone was 5 euro this month.

Gasoline for the Vespa was 8,20 euro. Working from home means I hardly use the Vespa. I could not use it all but leaving it stationary for months on end wouldn’t be very good. And I enjoy riding it, even if it still cold out. So I use it short trips to somes shops (extra advantage: no parking issues). Which does mean that on occasion I do need to fill up the gas tank. Februari was one of those occasions. I am curious if I will make it to April before needing another refill.

Exercise equipment: 799 euro. With the extra weights purchased last month and also Octobre last month I am set for my home gym except one important aspect: cardio.

I already had a full exercise weight bench from my youth. So I only needed some extra weights.

But for cardio I had nothing and with weights only I am not really losing weight. Yes, I do know you can lose fat with weights only but your power training regime needs to be a lot heavier than what I am doing. I have zero ambitions to go this route. So some kind of cardio was necessary.

I will delve into the exact reasons why I chose rowing in my health report (which I pinky swear I will publish in March, well perhaps April…). But for 799 euro I bought the Cobra XRT plus 2 from Hammer.

The Cobra XRT plus 2 is a midrage row trainer that should give me years of exercise torture! With an annual subcription for our local swimming pool at 250 euro 4 years of use should let me earn this money back! But if it improves my weight I am ok with it costing me money!

I didn’t use the rowing machine in Februari, because it arrived late on a Saturday, I spend 2 hours on Sunday assembling it in or pretty cold utility room and then on Sunday evening I hurt my ankle pretty badly! Which explains the 4 euro final expense of Februari to go visit my doctor! Nothing broken but those ligaments were pretty fubar! So it was only 3 March before I used the rowing machine for the first time. But I will delve into that torture in the upcoming health report …