Housing costs are pretty much eating up my budget, despite living in a tiny apartment. Apart from this obligatory costs I managed to keep my expenses in check pretty well thanks to a higher wage this month. Read bellow to find out how much I earned and what I spend my money on!
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Overview
Lets go over the different income & expenses for this month
Income
My income was really good at 5167.39 EUR, thanks to a holiday bonus that is about half of my income this month.
I started a YouTube channel, but it seems you need 1000 subscribers to turn on adds. Click on the YouTube image at the right if you want to help me out by subscribing! I assume this could actually take me a year to achieve this, but this blog was not built in one day either!
I also have seen that things that are good for the blog (like data) are not necessarily good for YouTube, and perhaps the other way around as well. YouTube does give me other options to visualize and I really like that!
Do you actually know any easy tools to visualize statistics for videos? Let me know!
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Expenses
Housing: with 1557 EUR we see yet another month with high costs. This despite living in a one bedroom apartment. I had quite high costs. 547 EUR of this is my loan, I also had to pay quarterly syndic costs (549 EUR) + an additional 180 EUR for water usage. It seems with everyone working from home you use more water now!
Hobby’s at 325.75 EUR: I can never resist spending money on sports. Apart from tennis and fitness I also spend 150 EUR on running shoes. I could have put these under shopping as well, but I think hobby’s is more appropriate. All in all running is a cheap sport, I get a new pair of running shoes every 2-3 years.
Groceries 209.74 EUR: I was a bit surprised to see this so low. I did pay extra attention when shopping and I got a bit tired of cooking so I started eating more microwaved food. I try to switch between the healthy meals in the Albert Hein and the Less but cheap microwave dishes in the Aldi. Apart from these healthy microwave meals I buy almost everything in the Aldi.
Restaurants at 48 EUR: This has actually been going up. I rather not spend more then 100 EUR / month on this, but so far it seems to be okay! People are not really exited yet to go on restaurants, but at the same time it was so nice to be able to have a drink outside on a terrace!
Gifts 30 EUR: Flowers for mothers day..
Otherwise just some smaller costs like parking (25 EUR), health (14 EUR) and bank costs (4.25 EUR).
Electricity / gas Usage
Compared to last year my electricity usage is still a lot lower. This is partly because I have bought some lower energy devices and smart plugs! There is a small rise compared to last month that I think its related to the freezer that I turned on for Ice-cream in summer. I did also get a new low-energy external screen in June that I might see some effect from.
Investments
This is a bit harder to track, because I also sold some investments, but NET I did invest around 3000 EUR this month
Find all the details on where I invested in, in my monthly portfolio update!
Budget review for 2021
Total Expenses for May = 2235 EUR.
This month I am above the Budget I set for myself for 2021 (1917 EUR/month), but I don’t really blame myself, the housing costs made it impossible to stay under.
Bellow is the graph between Target (budget) & Spend. But I also want to take a holiday and right now it seems there is not much to spare for that if I want to stick on budget! Especially since I expect extra housing costs coming up soon!
I will be taking a holiday anyway, if not in June then in July. I am getting my first vaccine on Monday, and by mid-July I will be fully vaccinated and able to travel quite easy. Of course it seems that as it is now it means going over budget, but then so be it :-((
Saving Rate
I am able to report 56.74% saving rate this month!
2019 saving rate: 45.8%
2020 saving rate: 42.86%
2021 saving rate (so far): 50.01%
What’s next
- Our apartment block seems to have major issues with water and pluming. I believe there will be major expenses coming our way because of this!
- Of course taking all the above into account I will do my very best not to purchase anything additionally the coming months.
- I’m looking for something to easily visualize statistics for videos, if you know how any such tool let me know!
- I’m going to update my yearly overview this weekend!
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