Summary

This month’s spending is a little different because the balance for our Africa trip was due. As you can see, this meant we shelled out over £6,000 on this alone! We’ll go into more detail on this below.

Ignoring these payments for a moment we actually had a fairly normal month, spending £1,942.

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, with any large inclusions explained in detail.

Category	Amount	Notes
Housing	£973	See below
Food	£250	See below
Transport	£258	See below
Entertainment/misc	£461	See below
Sub-Total	£1,942	Excluding Africa payments
Africa!	£6,279	See below
Total	£8,221	Ouch!

We break each of these categories down in the following sections.

Housing

The housing category consists of our mortgage payment, overpayments, bills, insurance, DIY costs etc. This was a fairly typical month in this category.

Category	Amount	Notes
Mortgage	£467
Overpayment	£283
Bills	£111	Gas, electricity, water
Council Tax	£101
Internet	£11
Total	£973

Food

We spent £250 on food this month which we hope is our new norm. We recently reduced our food spending quite significantly!

Transport

There were no annual expenses this month (i.e. MOT, tax etc) so this was a fairly cheap month for transport.

Category	Amount	Notes
Diesel	£189	Mainly Miss Way’s work plus a trip to Scotland
Train Fares	£69	Part of Miss Way’s bike + train + bike commute
Total	£258

Entertainment/Misc

This month our friends got married in Scotland. We turned this into a camping trip, spending just under a week enjoying the Scottish weather (mostly rain!). It’s worth pointing out that the cost of the campsite doesn’t appear in this month’s spending because it was paid for a long time ago. The same applies to the Hen Do which Miss Way went on. For reference it was £88 for 4 nights camping and the Hen Do was £65.

In addition to this, we spent more on meals and drinks out than a typical month. We also bought a few things for our Africa trip as we ramp up our preparations!

Considering all of the above, we are quite happy with the £461 entertainment/misc sub-total.

Category	Amount	Notes
Phone Bills	£15
TV License	£13
Lottery	£8
Professional Fees	£23
Clothes	£39	Miss Way bought some socks and a waterproof for Africa!
Birthday Present	£11
Sports Team Costs	£31	Match fees, floodlights, equipment etc
Meals/Drinks Out	£88	Socialising with friends/family
Stuff for Africa/Camping	£56	Water bottles, new camping towels and some clothes for Miss Way. 2 new SD cards for the camera and a new washbag for Mr Way.
Camping Spending	£175	Food, wedding present and a photograph/canvas we bought of the area!
Thank You Card	£2
Total	£461

Africa

So as we have already said, this month we totally blew our budgets out of the water. We spent more than 4x our normal monthly spending of ~£2,000. This is because we had to pay the outstanding balance for our Africa trip this summer. We had already paid a deposit of £2,520 but this month saw the outstanding balance of £6,279 leave our accounts.

Category	Amount	Notes
Africa Trip Balance	£3,139	Mr Way
Africa Trip Balance	£3,139	Miss Way
Total	£6,279

We’re sure this will be worthwhile in the long term, but it leaves us feeling a bit sick seeing so much leave our accounts in one go!

We’ll do a full breakdown of the costs of this trip in due course, but it’s looking like being in the region of £11,000 all in (for both of us). Having already paid £8,799, most of the damage has now been done!

There is a positive to take from all of this extra spending. We managed to get a good level of cashback by signing up for American Express credit cards which we used to pay this outstanding balance. This managed to get us £241 in cashback. While this only makes a tiny dent in our overall trip costs, it’s certainly a big help and well worth signing up for the cards.

Despite this huge additional expense this year, we are managing to cut spending in other areas to offset some of the costs. In Mr Way’s personal spending spreadsheet, he is still expecting to hit a savings rate of ~45% this year. More on this below.

Savings Rates

We’ve had a few questions about savings rates etc since starting these monthly spending posts. We don’t intend to report our income here for privacy reasons. Because of this, there won’t be a breakdown of monthly savings rates within these posts. While we can see the benefit of this, we don’t feel comfortable sharing this information at present.

Monthly savings rates are also somewhat misleading when including Miss Way’s income. She is mostly self-employed so income can be very lumpy, especially when she forgets to invoice for long periods!!

In our opinion, the spending side of the equation is much more interesting to share. Regardless of income, we can all learn from each other when it comes to spending less and of course this will speed up the journey to FIRE whatever your income.

Having said that, we have mentioned above a ballpark figure for Mr Way’s expected savings rate this year (including the expensive Africa trip). Mr Way has also recently shared his version of Cashflow Cop’s FI Score Test on Twitter. Miss Way earns a bit less so her savings rate will be a bit lower.

Let us know if you have any other comments on how we can make these posts more useful! We appreciate any feedback.

Previous Posts

Monthly Spending – April 2019

Monthly Spending – March 2019