Summary
Welcome to our annual spending post! Our total spend for the year of 2020 was £22,858. For context, this is for 2 adults plus a baby, born in July 2020.
If you’ve been following our monthly spending posts, you’ll know how this goes. Throughout 2020 we managed to keep our spending pretty low. We’re really happy with the total as it’s below our £2,000 per month target by a healthy margin.
This is partly due to being in lockdown and not having much to spend money on. But to be honest, this has had a minimal impact for us. Our spending is low even in normal times, so this year was always going to be a low total. We had already decided we wouldn’t be spending much due to Baby Way arriving in July. Settling into parenthood was our top priority!
We break our main expenses down into broad categories starting with the big 3; housing, food and transport. Everything else falls into the entertainment category.
| Category | Amount |
|---|---|
| Housing | £12,368 |
| Food | £4,067 |
| Transport | £1,101 |
| Entertainment/misc | £5,322 |
| Total | £22,858 |
Housing
Our annual spending on housing is as expected. There were no major shocks so it has been consistent around the £1,000 per month mark.
Food
With an average of £339 per month on supermarket spending, we eat really well. We could probably reduce this a little if we really wanted, but we enjoy our food too much to cut significantly!
The ‘food’ category contains everything we spend in the supermarket, so it has some toiletries etc thrown in.
We always do our main shop at Aldi, with any extras we couldn’t find coming from Tesco.
Transport
This has been the biggest boost from 2020. We’ve barely spent anything on transport because we haven’t been allowed to go anywhere! Also, Miss Way has been off work since July on maternity leave. Her commute is usually the main source of transport spending!
Entertainment/Misc
Everything else falls into this category! There’s a lot of scope to reduce the total of over £5,000, but we think we get a lot of value for that money!
One area where we’re aiming to reduce our spending in 2021 is eating out. Because we can only go for walks with friends/family, we’ve ended up spending a lot in cafes!
That’s All for Now, Folks!
We expect our spending to be a bit higher in 2021. We have a wedding booked for July. While we’re unsure whether this will go ahead as planned, we’re likely to have to keep paying for things regardless! We also plan to have a honeymoon if possible, although this may get pushed back to 2022.
We’ve barely used our car in 2020. While we aim to keep this to an absolute minimum, we expect to use it much more in 2021 as things hopefully open back up and Miss Way is likely to start some ‘in person’ work.
No doubt there will also be some ‘unforeseeable’ expenses in 2021. Despite all of this, we’ll do our best to stay as close to our £2,000 per month, £24,000 annual target as possible.
In reality, our FIRE goals are based on annual spending of £15,000 each, so we’re well under that. We’re happy with this approach, as it means we will have more to spend on holidays etc once we FIRE!
We hope 2021 brings you everything you hope for. Let us know how your annual spending looked and if you can beat ours!
If you want to see how our FIRE Funds are coming along, see our 2020 Financial Review. For a more personal take on how our 2020 went, see Mr Way’s 2020 Personal Review.