Since we moved house two years ago and overextended ourselves with the whole trying to own two properties thing, tracking spending has always continued to happen but it became something I needed to do but because for quite a while we were living so beyond our means the numbers didn’t really mean much. 

We’re not treading water anymore and I knew we would be going back to actively tracking our spending eventually, and as of this month we are back to actively tracking our spending to try to live within our means.  (It always worked before! Am glad to be back at this point finally)

I have always found that if we watch what we spend day to day using the spending app overall we are ok and able to live comfortably. (As the saying goes “look after your pennies and the dollars will look after themselves“ ).  Two months ago our bills bank account went down to $270 (not really heard of for us) and last month if I hadn’t noticed it would have gone into negative! We had to transfer $900 from our savings to get by; so it became crucial to go back to our old ways of actively tracking our spending because something isn’t working here. (Probably 50%-75% due to the cost of living crisis and also somewhat due to not limiting our spending where necessary)

It’s the 24th day of this month and we have $70.50 left which is not great because we have another 6 days to go which also includes a weekend, because Sunday is the 30th. But no fuel needs to be bought until next Monday 1st July and we have no plans to go out, so even if we go into the negative (which is possible as it is a 5 weekend month) hopefully it won’t be by much. Wish us luck in getting through the last few days! 

Hello my SA friends!  It’s been a while but I’m popping in to say hi. I actually did a blog post right before Christmas last year and went to post it and there were some website problems so didn’t, forgot about it but have been regularly reading SA blogs and articles. I just got out of the posting routine. I’m glad to see you are all doing pretty well though!

The post was about my goals for 2024 and I’m happy to say that even though I didn’t post the entry I have actually been doing some of the things planned. 

The things which have been going well are as follows:

I have a direct debit from our bank account our wages are deposited into to my brokerage account of 5% of my pay as kind of an emergency fund.  The direct debit expires at the end of this year because next year I’m planning to send the 5% to our mortgage loan as extra payments and the year after to my superannuation fund (known as a retirement account in the US). Basically I want to rotate the savings into different places each year. 

Last year I did the 365 penny challenge into an old bank account we weren’t using to turn this bank account into my credit card like bank account. (I had to cancel my credit cards to qualify for our home loan and while I don’t have any credit cards of my own now I do still need some money separate from our checking account to cover the things I would have spent on my credit card). At the end of last year $667 was saved. I was going to do the challenge again but stopped it, however still kept the regular $10 direct debit from our checking account to this account. As long as every purchase is repaid (which it is) it will grow by $520 per year. 

The other things are a work in progress. 

Life has been slowly calming down after moving house and selling our old house which is good. While there is always something going on and life is never perfect or easy it’s nice to not have the level of stress we had last year and the year before. 

Today it is King’s Birthday public holiday so we had a quiet day in where I did washing, washed my car and walked our dog Diesel, and B pottered around in the shed doing a bit of work on his project bike. It was a relaxing and productive day.