After throwing money aimlessly into the wind, I’ve finally decided to get serious and make a budget. It’s time. I really want to get serious about savings, making money and investments so I need to bite the bullet and be accountable for my money. At the moment, I have an automatic payment set up weekly that pays myself $750 per week out of my business account. I sat down today and mapped out my essential expenses and I was surprised by how high they are. This month I’m going to map them out and see how they actually correspond with what I think they are. Here are my weekly and monthly expenses:
Ignore the random dollar signs, excel wouldn’t let me delete them… That’s one pretty expensive picture, right there. $500 a week on essential expenses? When did I get so expensive?
My rent for my entire apartment is $360 a week, but my partner and I half it. Power probably runs a bit cheaper than that, but that’s a guess. I rounded up my petrol costs because I thought I’d factor in for things like warrants and registrations, but this month I need to get my car a service and some bulbs replaced so I feel it’ll be rather expensive. We’re trying to keep our food prices down but we are really bad at spending a lot on groceries. Gym isn’t too bad, especially when I actually go and use my membership.
I’ve committed to helping my two youngest sisters out with their pocket money $15 each per week and a tutor at $20 per hour for 1.5 hours. My mum’s not in a position to help in this way, so I think it’s good that I can help them with their education and a little money to buy things they need/want. There’s not a lot of “fat” I can trim from this budget, although it’ll be interesting to see how my costs change when I’m traveling.
How I’m going to Handle my Budget
As I have an automatic payment of $750 per week and my weekly expenses are around $500 per week, that means I have around $250 to play with. I would be happy if I could shift $150-200 of this a week into savings, but we’ll see. I am going to track all my expenses for the next month and see how I end up spending my money over the course of this period. I’ve done some calculations and I think I can push a lot into savings if I spend my money sensibly.
If I reached my goal of $20,000 in income I could probably move $10,000 into savings for the month, depending on what my operating costs are. As I’m just starting my savings account this month, that would be a pretty awesome amount to get started with.
Since I’m pretty new to budgets, I’d love to hear how you allocate your spending for the week or month… let me know in the comments below!