Category: monthly expense report (Page 2 of 6)

A focus on my health and another lockdown(which our government is calling a ‘easter break’) really helped keeping the spending in check.

Income: 2 177,55 euro

Expenses: 1 280,60 euro

Savings: 899,40 euro or 41,26%

Income:

No gift from the parents so just my normal income from work which stood at 2 177,55 euro

Expenses:

At 1 280,60 euro expenses were pretty low in March. They would have been ever lower ha dit not been for some obligated things.

First of is off course the 1 100 euro that went to our joint account for my part of the mortgage, utilities, groceries and such ..

But my health insurance was also due this month. It cost me a grand total of 74,40 euro.

I also received my annual cost for the use of my Visa card: 22 euro. I know I could get a free card via Keytrade or Argenta but for the moment we are stuck at the big bank due to our mortgage and I am too lazy to get another bank account just to avoid this cost. I have been looking into prepaid credit cards. But I can only find mastercards with no anual fee. Since my girlfriend has a mastercard I prefer to have a Visa card. Coverage isn’t exactely the same for both and it has been to our advantage in the past to have access to both networks.

Mobile phone was only 1,20 euro as we had accumulated enough points to get a reduction.

New sport shoes to use on the rowing machine cost me 50 euro.

I needed a new cable for my headphone which set me back 10 euro. Also in the entertainment section: a game on steam for 5 euro.

Nothing for the Vespa as working from home has me almost not using it. I will need to fill up in April.

Rounding up the March expenses was 18 euro‘s spend on extra food. A better focus on my health kept the extra food expenses really low in March. Here’s hoping for a repeat in April!

Total expenses for the first three months now stand at 4 482 euro which means that on average I have stayed below my self imposed budget of 1 500 euro a month!

Average savings rate even hovers above 37%. Previous years this was more around 30%. this was off vourse for a full year so I will see if I can keep it above 30% for the rest of the year. My guess is savings will drop substantially once stuff starts opening up again.

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 …

The last day of Februari seems to me as the perfect day for a recap of the month Januari. Because .. if you know you’re lazay, clap your hands, … If you know you’re lazy clap you hands ..

Income : 2 222 euro

expenses: 1 239,20 euro

Savings : 982,80 euro 44,23%

Income:

Income was plain old boring work income plus a 50 euro end of year gift from the parents. The parents actualy gave me a bit more money at the end of year. But since most of it was destined for the purchase of a rowing machine. And since I bought that in February it made a bit more sence to als book the gift in Februari. All it does is moothing out the numbers a bit.

Expenses:

As every month, 1 100 euro went into our joint account to pay the mortgage, utilities and our joint grocery shopping.

Extra food was 61 euro. Once more, pizzahut is to blame!

I also spend 78 euro on extra weights for my fitness equipment. I still haven’t received the complete order as home fitness sales have apparently tripled over the last year and there is a huge backlog for everything. But once everything is delivered I should have enough weights for the rest of the year.

And that’s it. that’s all I bought in Januari. Lockdowns are cheap!

The bitcoins are worth 240 euro at the moment but I am planning on spending all my ill gotten gains in March. Darknet here I come!

With no more expenses for the side gig and my end of year work bonus being paid, December should be a great month for savings. Let’s have a look.

Income:

Woohoo for the income!

Most of it, 3 679,15 euro was work income. My regular mothly wages + the end of month bonus. The remaining 150 euro was from christmas gifts from the parents and my mother-in-law.

Expenses:

I may, or may not have come in under budget this month depending on how you look at one particular expense this month. Mor e on that at the end of this post.

As I do every month I transferred 1 100 euro to our joint account to pay the mortgage, utilities and our joint grocery shopping.

Extra food was 100 euro. Being home helps me not buying extra food to eat during lunch. Especially because I now do my fitness during lunch break which just dossn’t leave me with any time to speed of to the nearest shop and buy some chips. I spend 60 euro on these extra snacks and then another 40 euro on pizza for me and a co-worker as the co-worker is leaving the compagny and pizza together was a bit our thing … Since he is leaving I paid for his pizza too.

Gas for the Vespa was 0 euro this month as I only drove it one time to work (and one trip to the shop to get some extra chips …). Which reminds me I need to take it for a spin in January and pump up the tires.

Mobile phone subscription for a bizare reason was only 2,5 euro. I have no idea why it was not it’s regular 12 euro and I am too lazy to find out.

Miscelanious expenses are a shampoo for 17 euro and a game on steam for 12 euro.

And then we come to the gift’s section where accounting my expenses has a tricky part.

The non tricky part is the 10 euro I chipped in for the goodbye gift for the co-worker keaving. And 130 euro I spend for end of year gifts for the family.

The tricky – acconting wise – part is the 100 euro I spend on buying Bitcoins. This because for a certain gift I needed bitcoins to pay for it. So I spend 100 euro buying bitcoins on Coinbase. But Coinbase also gives you a sign up bonus and allows you to ear some alt coins by watching some instructional videos (alt coins I off course exchanged into bitcoin the moment I received them). And then there was the incredibale value rise of Bitcoins in the second half of December… Long story short is that I bought the gift (which was 45 euro) but my balance on Coinbase is now close to 200 euro …

So did I just buy a 45 euro gift? Because, then I stayed below my 1 500 euro budget this year… or did I invest a 100 euro, bought the gift with part of my profits and still have another 100 euro in profit I should book? Since it’s a low amount. And since I am still not a fan of this whole crypto craze and will probaby use up the remaining balance in the future for other gifts, I just decided to book the 100 euro as an expense in the ‘random fun’ category.

November is the month I really tried to get my side gig off the ground. This effort was reflected in my spending. But since I was busy with that project I couldn’t spend a lot of money on other things. So my monthly numbers aren’t that bad.

Income: 2 287,35 euro

Expenses: 1 625,02 euro

Savings : 662,33 euro or 29%

Income:

Income was my regular paycheck from work plus a gift from the parents. Nothing exiting to report here.

Expenses

As I do every month I transferred 1 100 euro to our joint account to pay the mortgage, utilities and grocery shopping.

Extra food was 71,80 euro because I eat too much pizza. And even eating from home does not eliminate this expense completely it seems.

Gas for the Vespa was once again 8,40 euro. Standing still for too long isn’t good so I on occasion use the Vespa to go somewhere (like to go get exta food at the supermarket, I know, I know …).

Mobile phone was 12 euro, because no calls out of bundle.

I paid for Netflix (Belgium is once a gain in a semi lockdown) this month: 16 euro

Expenses for the side gig : 411,82 euro

The side gig is why I went over budget this month. The amount isn’t only for the side gig. As explained last month I put all of my online – let’s call it experiments – at one place. So 166,82 euro of hosting costs also cover this site. And the domain name fees for a year also cover financialfreedomsloth. But 153 euro was all for the side gig as it was one year of use for Buddyboss. I am really impressed by their offering. A bit of money and a few days of work and you can have your own litle community up and running without knowing any coda. I first tried it with buddypress, bbpress and a 62 euro thema that should tie all of it together but couldn’t really make it work. So that was 62 euro spend to learn what didn’t work for me. Honestely, the stuff you can do online for 500 euro a year baffles me!

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!

While I paid the air travel and AirB&B part of our Holiday in August, September was actually the month we went on Holiday. We stayed 10 days in the Algarve region of Portugal. So how much did we actually spend during this ‘holiday’ month? The numbers are below.

Income : 2 246 euro

Expenses : 1 7325,50 euro

Savings : 510,50 euro or 22,73%

Income

Income was my regular paycheck from work and a small anniversy gift . Income will remain around this level until I get a side gig of the ground. And since I want to build something of my own and not just work a few additional hours left and right, the side gig is going to take some time.

Expenses

Yes! Back to positive savings numbers! And actually not bad for a month with a 10 day holiday abroad in it.

I had my fixed amount of 1 100 euro to deposit in our joint account to pay for boring stuff like our mortgage, utilities, food and such.

I also bought (my final, I promise it!) game on steam for 18 euro.

I did spend 70 euro on food during work days. I shouldn’t have because diet, but at the very least it is on a downward spiral. Not working for 2 weeks did help off course.

When shopping for some extra holdiay clothes for myself I saw a nice summer dress (for the girlfriend) which I bought her. We do not do the regular gifts for birthdays, new year and such but occasionaly we spot something we think our partner would like and then we buy it. In this case it was 50 euro well spend.

During the holiday I spend 490 euro. 50 euro was uber rides and the rest grocerie shopping, visiting restaurants and the ferry to a nearby island. I was on a holiday and didn’t really want to keep track of all my spending in detail so I just kept track of the cash I withdrew from the local ATM. I off course only withdrew two big amounts to limit withdrawal costs to a minimum. I do not mind spending money on a good meal (or a really big chocolat croissant) or leaving a nice tip. But even in a holiday mood I seem to hate paying banking fees.

In the name of full transparacy. I did forget to include my mobile phone subscription in the September expense report. But I am too lazy to go dig it up. So yeah, this report is off by 12 to 15 euro. If their is a battle between lazy and accurate, lazy is going to win each and every time. This is after all, Financial Freedom Sloth,

August was the first month since March 2019 where I didn’t save any money. In 2019 the reason was me buying a new car. In August a holiday was the rason for the negative savings rate. Below are the numbers:

Income : 2 212 euro

Expenses : 2 465,90 euro

Savings : -253,90 euro or – 11,48%

Income

Income was my regular paycheck from work and a small anniversy gift from my parents. Small gift because they also helpt with some home renovation costs so I am not complaining.

Expenses

2 465,90 euro is a big number but I packed a lot of fun in that amount.

I had my fixed amount of 1 100 euro to deposit in our joint account to pay for boring stuff like our mortgage, utilities, food and such. Mid month I had to deposit an additional 200 euro into the joint account because she was running low. We are in the midst of renovation our office room and usually do not keep a big balance on our joint account. I prefer saving on my personal account andmaking additional paiments to the joint account when necessary as opposed to a higher monthly contribution and saving on the joint account directly.

Another purely practical expanes was 36 euro for gasoline for the Vespa and a bit for the car (the car is usually paid from the joint account).

A bad expense was again extra food bought for 76,7 euro. You would think my monthly – shameful – confessions of my overeating would have me quiet this bad habit, apparently not …

A bit more joyeus was the 15 euro gift for a co-worker who had a baby!

And then the really fun stuff for me personally:

83 euro for a sauna visit (and lunch at the restaurant)

58 euro for the truss for my laser and smoke machine (shown in this picture)

22,50 euro for a game on steam

145 euro for a restaurant visit with the parents and the girlfriend

And finally: 730 euro for my holiday in Portugal. This amount covers my half of the plain ticket and our airb&b rental.

Without all the fun stuff i would have actually remained under budget for the month and I definitely prefer spending my money on all of this than on anther maintenance bill for the Vespa!

After a pretty expensive month of June I was happy to have July return to a more normal level of expenses.

Income : 2 167,40 euro

Expenses : 1 559,90 euro

Savings : 607,50 euro or 28%

Income

July income can be summed up in one sentence: just my normal wages from work.

Expenses

A return to normal and actually almost within budget! Besides the 1100 euro I tranfer into our joint accounts (and which co-pays for our mortgage, food and utilisty bills) I only spend 460 euro:

70 euro on food I should not have bought: shame, shame on me!

33 euro on some health supplements: this actually makes the 70 euro on food from the previous line even worse! The best I can and should do for my health is lose weight. But this is something deserving of its own post. Supplement wise I am actually pretty frugal as I buy powder and fill my own capsules. This comes to about 1/3th the cost of buying pills in a bottle (packaging seems to be the main cost of most generic available supplements).

20 euro on cheap games on steam. People spend more on games during this lockdown apparently. I know I am!

20 euro on my cell phone plan

231 euro on a brand new laser and smoke machine! Yes I caved and bought myself a new laser. I went for the Laserworld EL-230RGB and the Ayra WSM black 01 smoke machine.

I am pretty happy both of them. Covid 19 has closed down all clubs in Belgium. These two turn our living room in our own private little club. In July you could see up to 15 people so we had a small 11 people party (no photo’s of that to protect the not so innocent grin) and the laser was a big hit.

I did have to improvise with the placement of everything. So I wasn’t a 100% happy and in August I also bought a truss to add to our set-up and that does add a little professional feel to the whole set-up. Me happy!

We are currently finishing the renovation of our office room. Once the office is finished we will finally be able to move the last of our boxes out of the living room and finish the living room (the wire sticking out of the wall). And this in turn will give me the space to turn that corner of our living room into our own small club. Off course, once we have replaced our roof I will have an entire 90 square metre attic to play with. But for the time being this will do .. .

Frugal living doesn’t mean living a miserable life but instead spending your money on what is important to you. it’s why I am not happy with the 70 euro spend on food I shoudl not have eaten in the first place but also why I am very happy spending the 230 euro on the laser and smoke machine.

June expenses really, really, annoyed me. Which is probably why I didn’t do this expense report sooner. The numbers below may look good but it is what behind the (expense) number that annoys me.

Income : 3 623,74 euro

Expenses : 2 423,50 euro

Savings: 1 200,24 euro of 33,12%

Income

June income consists of my normal wages + my holiday money. The total is 3 623,74 euro and this will be the last time work is giving me anything extra for the remainder of the year. The higher income is alos the only reason why I was able to save at all. My normal income of around 2 160 euro would have not covered my expenses.

Expenses

Those expenses were 2 423,50 euro. The main culprit for this high amount is the Vespa.

Due to working form home most of the days I do not use the Vespa all that much anymore. This is the reason why maintenance only happened in June. In my mind this was going to be a ‘cheap’ maintenance. New tires and some other stuff decided otherwise and left me with a maintenance bill of 890 euro. Driving the Vespa too fast even added another speeding ticket of 108 euro. Add in some gasoline for the Vespa and I spend just over a 1000 euro on the Vespa this month. In other words, I would have remained firmly within my budget this month without the Vespa related costs.

I blame in part my garage, and in part myself.

Blaming the garage is the easy part. They maintain the Vespa too well. Honestely they do! They do the maintenance by the book which means they replace stuff when the maitnenance book says it is time to replace it. Thing is that those maintenance books err on the safe side. Big advantage is that your Vespa is always purring like a happy little kitten. Downside is that it increases the maintenance costs. Those new tires? Yes they could use replacing. On the other hand, I am sure they would have survived another 2 to 3,000 km’s, probably … So a bit more flexibility with the ‘recommended’ maitnenance guidelines could save me a couple of bucks left an right. But I think we all knwo who is the main culprit here. Yep, it is me.

The person I really need to blame is myself! I know the maintenance is expensive. Hell, I did an entire post about it back in January. What was the conclusion again of that post?

Right, I need to move my ass on the electrical bicycle front. Did I do it?

Nope. I didn’t do it in June when I was really annoyed at the high maintenance cost.

And I haven’t done it now, almost 2 months later. People, really, if I tell you guys I am a lazy SOB, believe me, I am!! So yeah, I still need to do this.

And since I am being critical about myself. The second largest expense in June after the Vespa was, drum roll … Food! 133 euro worht of extra food I purchased.

Might not be a big amount but I am supposed to be trying to lose weight! It is my eternal struggle and this 133 euro just represants too many instances where i didn’t follow my food regime. I am definitely being to lazy there.

The othere expenses were a 50 euro gift, a visit too Pairi Daisa (we visited shortly after it reopened during the week so almost no people!). My cell phone bill (13 euro this month) and a game on steam for 17 euro. All very reasonable, normal expenses. If it wasn’t for the damn Vespa and all my eating June would have been a very good month …