High housing costs and Holidays killed my saving rate!

After having a horrible month for my investments it will now be the second month in a row I need to report a bad saving rate. And this time even much worse then last month. although if I compare with last year its very similar to February when my holiday expenses came in later due to using a different credit card.

Let’s go over the highlights of this month:

• Restaurants costs have dropped to 211 EUR in December! Another small gain to improve my expenses on restaurants!
• Living costs rose to 1565 EUR this month. This included the loan – 550 EUR, quarterly cleaning costs – 270 EUR – sometime I do think to cancel cleaning and extra syndic costs for the apartment block – 700 EUR. Last year I paid the quarterly costs in March, so it was unexpected that it came a month early
• I spend about 1000 EUR on a citytrip, January is often a month I do trips. I do 2-3 trips a year, but I expect this will be one of the more expensive
• I spend 70 EUR on hobbys, which is rather low this month. The winter months and cold limit my mountainbiking I guess
• My food costs dropped a bit to 150 EUR
• I upgraded my wordpress blog for 212 EUR, so I could use plug-ins and have access to more features. This has been one of the best decisions, I really love the ease that WordPress allows me to add plugins
• Some other smaller expenses
• I had no special bonuses this month to save my saving rate

Again the 1270 EUR seems like an impossible goal unless I plan to live inside a cave and never come out! But maybe there will be one month where I manage to pull this off. Maybe February?

So I got a negative saving rate of -1%. Hopefully this will be the only month this year!

The chart

The moment you have all been waiting for 😉 The graph with my savings rate. This month I am doing much worse then last year (eeek!!). But that’s also because my holiday expenses for last year didn’t came in until February and my housing costs came in 2 months earlier then last year!

Average saving rate so far…

As a final note I want to close with my average saving rate. So far I am able to get a 40% savings rate in the last 12M, a decrease with about 5%. Next month I plan to do better when I compete with a much easier month (February).

I have a competition with myself that I need to do 5% better then last year. So far I can say I am doing a horrible job doing actually 70% worse then last year. But we still have a whole year to go so I will not give up and do better next month!

Its in Red as I feel like anything under 50% should be in red 🙂

Whats next

I don’t expect big expenses next month and I will be working the full month so my income should be a little higher.

I do plan to go out a little bit more after work. I noticed that while its cheap to sit home alone, its better to be around people, so I will try to be around people about twice a week. Of course

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