Budget Analysis — first 2 months of 2024

I really thought this year was going to be different.

Photo from Author — my actual budget analysis for January / February 2024

I am being very vulnerable here, and sharing my actual analysis of our income and expenditures in January (left) and February (right) for this year. I will not be revealing where our income has come from, but there are numerous sources included in these figures — including my full-time salary.

A few of points to make before I continue:

• I get paid on a fortnightly basis (very normal here in New Zealand).

• January saw me paid three times in one month, this isn’t usual — it’s just the way it fell, and only happens a couple of times a year.

• My last January pay showed up on the last day of the month and is in my January analysis, but my mortgage payment went out the next day, so shows up in my February analysis.

• Neither of these months are, what I would call, normal — most of the time I have two pays and two mortgage payments go out each month.
  

This year has not started the way I had planned; the past two years have been hard and very stressful. So this year — my word of the year is abundance, and I was expecting great, and wonderful things… not just financially (as my husband is restarting his business, after being on hold while he built our house), but also health-wise (after the cancer diagnosis in 2022), and just life in general.

An abundance of fun, family, faith, finances and friends; however, life has a way of keeping our feet on the ground.

We are still paying down debt from these past couple of years — most of that ‘excess’ you see in those analyses, went on the credit card. It feels like one step forward and two back, trying to pay that back.

My health has also continued to spiral down — another biopsy for another type of cancer, which came back last week benign (praise God), but I still have the symptoms I went to the Doctor for originally, to deal with. And just to top it off, an adverse reaction to a medication I was put on to help control the above symptoms, seems to have triggered off an auto-immune response — quite possibly Rheumatoid Arthritis, so I am off to see yet another Specialist for yet more tests.

But despite that, I am still here and I am still fighting.

With that, let me explain why I am sharing all this. I am determined to keep up with my budget this year, these past two years it has spiraled out of control with the house build, and my health. I haven’t been well enough, nor interested enough, to keep a close eye on anything. I also want to write this year, it has been something else that has dropped off the radar these past few years…

So I thought, what better way to keep on top of both these goals — write about my budget, my budgeting spreadsheet template that I have been sharing with friends and family, our dreams and goals related to the budget, and have some accountability all in one.

Hopefully, once I get into a rhythm and routine for this, it will inspire me to sit down and write other things. I am not short on ideas or stories, but I am short on time, and energy. However, if I want to write and follow my dreams, I need to stop making excuses and just do the work.

And here we go — caught between duty and dreams, and trying to build a bridge between the two.

The first thing I noticed was the big discrepancy between entertainment in the two months — January sitting at $740 versus February $131; now I know January is our summer, and we went on holiday. The kids were home from school, and I had a couple of weeks off, so I expected there to be a difference — but I was expecting over $600 difference, because I know our holiday was fairly frugal. So I just went back to analyse the difference between the two, and this is what I found:

In January I had been putting our ‘family pocket money’ against entertainment, but in February I didn’t categorise it, as I see it as a general expense. So when I look closer, there was an extra $300 in January entertainment that wasn’t taken into account in the same way in February. Taking that $300 out brings my January entertainment figure back down to $459.52, which is much more inline with what I was expecting.

But I need to make a decision now — do I categorise pocket money as entertainment from now on, because technically it is, even if it wasn’t spent in the same month. Or do I leave it out, and check it off just as a ‘transfer between accounts’ which is what I did for February and March?

I am not sure where to draw the line on that one… but whatever I decide, I need to be consistent.

Groceries, outside of mortgage, is my biggest expense; there are a few reasons for this:

• New Zealand is VERY expensive.

• We live in a small town, with only two supermarkets to choose from, and neither option is particularly cheap.

• We have gluten and dairy intolerances in our household, and the alternatives are even more expensive than the day-to-day items.

• I try to make a menu plan, but I don’t menu-plan to budget — I menu-plan to save my sanity.
  

However, I know there are still ways I can cut back on my grocery bill. So while I consider these, and do some further reading and thinking, I will sign off.

I am hoping to slowly build up a series on budgeting and finances, and real life. As I instigate new ideas and try things to save some money, I will share these with you as well. Maybe by being more mindful and helping myself, I can help some of you as well.