Bae likes flowers so I signed up for one of those monthly delivery services. They surprise her every month with fresh flowers. You don’t know what’s coming until they arrive since they only send out flowers of the month. You don’t get to choose. We’ve had 2 deliveries so far and I loved seeing how happy she was to receive them.
They send us flowers like this – although these aren’t the flowers we actually got.
It’s that time of month – time to review how well I did against my budget in January. Spoiler alert, I wasn’t great. I spent more money than I made and I pretty much spent too much in almost every category. Here are the gory details for you to revel in.
Happy New Year! I hope your holidays and the new year have been as splendid as mine were.
Today’s post is not a good one. I had a relapse on the spendthrift front. I’ve spent far too much money in the last few months, especially around the holidays. Here are my confessions to the universe.
I know, I know. We’re nearly a third of the way through July and I’ve only just got round to figuring out how much I spent in June. This should have been a half-year review too but I’m doing this at an airport because I was too cheap to pay for a night at an Airbnb following a post-midnight arrival. I don’t know how terrible this decision will prove to be but although sleeping on airport benches is proving not to be my thing, it turns out that early morning calculation isn’t either!
Moving used to be a super stressful event for me financially. Scraping together a month’s rent in advance as well as a 6 week deposit has always been challenging. This time round, I’ve not only got my rent and 6 week deposit ready, I have also got enough cash lying around to cover (one of) my housemate’s deposit which will then be returned to me via the tenancy deposit scheme where we’ve got the deposit for our current place. That’s a total of nearly £3 000 and I haven’t touched any of my proper savings accounts.
I’m going to miss a private garden but I’m not going to miss maintaining it
This spell of my life isn’t the first time that I’ve tried to cut back on my spending. I’ve been in tons of debt since 2010 and made various attempts at sorting out my lavish spending from 2011 till 2016. Since I didn’t know that my day-to-day spending was my biggest issue, I tried to do the sensible thing and made an effort at reducing my fixed spending – rent and transport.
I watched Collateral Beauty earlier and Will Smith (how is that man still gorgeous at 50?) plays a character who loses his young daughter. His major postulation is that there are only three abstractions to life. Three things that unite all of mankind. The desire to love. The fear of death. The wish for more time. Continue reading
As anyone reading the last few posts might know, I’ve been fairly rubbish at curbing my spending the last few weeks. When I started tracking my spending in August, I meant to do it for a few weeks (a month really) and use the data to create a realistic budget. At first I was pretty good, I discovered where my leaks were and made some progress plugging them. Then my parents got scammed and I paid their Airbnb charges, I went to Houston and then Edinburgh, and now Christmas.
Having read this article by Mr Money Mustache, I’ve become quite fixated on figuring out what the average monthly spend (for a house sharing, child free Londoner) would be so that I could work out what the 25% spending level I should be aiming for might be. I scoured the interwebs for hours on my mobile (with its spider web crack that makes reading a pain) and on my laptop at work and came up with the following. Please note that the numbers below assume an average take home amount of £2000 after tax, saving just over 10%, eating out or having lunch a few times a week and going out once a week, a weekly round trip taxi, and getting around zones 1-2 by public transport. Continue reading
I met a friend of mine I hadn’t see for ages for a drink and a bite to eat last night. I was working near Aldgate and we met in Croydon, a bit in the middle for where we both live. Croydon is a balls ache to get to in terms of my zone 1-2 travel card budget but it was totally worth doing because fostering relationships is one of the things that gives me joy. I promised myself that I would evaluate all the non-essential spending I do because the things I’m spending on make life a hell of a lot better in order to get a grip on how much I’m spending and how I can rein in that cost. Continue reading
Diary of a reforming spendthrift 