Keeping Track of my Expenses

As the title suggests, starting from this month we will be Tracking our Expenses to try and get a handle on what our average expenses are. As we seek financial freedom and early retirement, it is important to know what our expenses are so that we can work towards earning at least that amount passively each month.

We have tried this before for a month where we had a family Whats-app group where we used to write in what we buy each day. after the novelty wore off, it began a bit tedious and the novelty wore off and eventually we stopped recording purchases. This time we have agreed to try and use our bank cards for as much as possible which means that we can use our online banking and statements to easily check what we are spending.

This exercise has two main goals. The first one as mentioned earlier is to know exactly what our expenses are so we can plan how much passive income we need to cover our expenses in the future. Secondly we would like to try and maximise how much money we can invest without making sacrifices on doing the things that we enjoy.

I read a blog post recently from mrtakoescapes where using cavemen as an example of how a “keeping up with the jones” mentality when it comes to hobbies can seriously damage personal finances. While I don’t quite agree with everything in the post, it was very interesting and made me think about my hobbies and areas I could potentially be overspending in. Check out his post here.

It is good to save and invest as much as you can, but you only get one life which can end at any time so I think it is important to live your life a little bit. We Like to travel a little bit both around Ireland and the rest of world so this needs to be factored into our expenses.

For Tracking our Expenses, we will be using an Excel Spreadsheet, I got a template online ( I cant remember where because it was a long time ago) which breaks down the expenses in 6 different categories. For example the first two weeks of the month our outgoings looked as follows:

OVERALL SUMMARY	Current
	Lifestyle
Housekeeping Expenses	€601.80
Personal Expenses	€1,064.83
Cost of Servicing Debts	€530.55
Motoring Expenses	€75.02
Investment & Life Assurance	€40.00
Children & Grandchildren Expenses	€152.90
Total Monthly Outgoings	€2,465.10

Our personal expenses are by far our largest expenses this month from our 6 categories. If we examine them further we can see that the bulk of these expenses come from holidays (No surprise here) and Clothing.

Personal Expenses
Own Clothing & Footwear	€192.98
Eating Out	€63.33
Christmas/ Christening/ Birthday presents	€202.65
Holidays	€535.49
Subscriptions	€5.54
Books	€14.84
Other Personal Expenses	€50.00
Lunches	€6.32
TOTAL	€                  1,064.83

The holiday expense was an unexpected expense for this month as it is the cost of getting transport to and from the airport in Spain in July. We had planned to pay it in July when we got to Spain but the operator required payment up front so we just decided to pay for it now. Mrs EMF is also going to Liverpool in December, which she does every year but she usually books these flights In the summer time. So while these were two expenses that we expected to pay, we just did not expect to pay them this early.

The expense for my clothing is certainly out of character as I usually don’t buy too much in this area but this month I really wanted a smart watch to track my fitness and sleep patterns so splashed out on a Huawei smart watch while they were on sale in Argos.

The last main expense this month was for our sons birthday where we have booked a weekend away glamping which we will be going to in February.

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