Everyone knows I’m a natural spendthrift, I mean even new readers of the blog can tell as much from the title. Two things that might not be as immediately obvious are:
Love love this movie – nothing to do with this post but there’s no Love and FI movie.
So I tracked my spending pretty diligently from mid-August until the end of December (my end of December was the 25th because my months currently start on payday while I try to get a month ahead on my bills). I haven’t shared my findings in a single post yet, mainly because for the first 6 weeks I was tweaking my tracking. The last three months, I’ve been more consistent. Here’s what the last quarter of 2016 looked like.
I’m furious! Nothing fills me quite so much with dread these days as the large group meals. You know the kind I mean? Birthday dinners. Or hen do brunches. Work ones are the worst for me now. They weren’t so bad when I was a consultant and could generally expense most of the costs. Neither was I so bothered when I didn’t mind shelling out fifty quid for a meal. Now that I’m on a pretty tight budget it’s quite a different story. Continue reading
Enchiladas for double date night with the housemate
In a week dominated by hosting far too many joyful expenses and unexpectedly expensive stuff to deal with injury and illness, I still managed to stay on budget. Continue reading
It’s not been as easy as I would like to track my spending the last couple of weeks, mainly because of a couple of deferred spending scenarios – TFL I’m looking at you – that make it difficult to look at my accounts on Monday morning and know that every penny in them is actually mine. This week, though, because I didn’t get charged for travel on Sunday (weekly travel cap for the win), I’m in a much better place today. Continue reading
Last week was quite difficult to keep track of because I had money moving in and out of everywhere and I didn’t always have the opportunity to track daily.
Monday
I’ve been trying to learn Italian for a few years. My first trip, after I’d got a graduate job and felt entitled to start seeing the world (in style), was to Rome. I went with a work friend and we picked Rome because at the time we were obsessed with Dan Brown books and Angels and Demons had just been released. We wanted to see all the places that were mentioned in the book plus who doesn’t love Italy? I fell in love with the people, the culture, the food, the ambience, the weather (in March), and most of all the language. I don’t think I made any serious efforts to learn how to speak though until 2009 when I met my kick-ass friend FL who I girl-crushed on and wanted to impress with my language skills. Continue reading
Monday
Tuesday
Monday
Tuesday
This was my first week of tracking all my spending religiously. I’m trying to get a baseline, a sense of what I’m OK at, what needs improving as well as a way of tracking change over the next 2 years or so that I think it will take me to become totally debt free.
Monday
Tuesday
Diary of a reforming spendthrift 