My First Spending post! Yah!

I have been tracking my spending for a long time know, but I have never really analysed the data and made any goals to try and improve. Hopefully, these posts will allow me to do that.

So here is March’s spending.

The one thing that is good about the above graph is that nearly 50% of our expenses are the mortgage. Once we have paid that off, we can really ramp up investing and growing our passive income stream. The bad side is that the mortgage won’t be paid off for several years now. And it is time to start re-negotiating the rate.

The Pros

Investing was up

In March I opened a new account with InvestNow and deposited some money to buy some passive funds. This is because my previous managed funds with Rabobank were being migrated there anyway, as Rabobank has moved out of the fund business.

Groceries were down

Our grocery bill was down for the month of March!

Miscellaneous consumption

Miscellaneous consumption, or consumerism as I like to call it, was down for the month of March. That is great. I consciously  

The Cons

Car expenses

Car expenses always surprise me as to how large they are! A whopping 13% of my total expenses. I would be totally owned if Mr Money Mustache has a look into my expenses. Next month my car expenses should go down. There was a lot of driving going on in March and I had to do some yearly maintenance and replace a few failing parts.  

Bank fees

Bank fees are up. I don’t even know what they were until I realized that I had automatically categorized a few speeding tickets into bank fees. I don’t have a category for speeding tickets. It’s not a common occurrence for me to get them, so I will leave them there. There was a lot of driving in March. That could also explain why owning my sofa on wheels had a total expense of 13%.

Goals

The goal for April is to bring car spending down and to put that excess into investing.  In April we will also have to negotiate with the bank for a good rate. And if the rate they offer us isn’t what we expect we will go to another bank to see if they want our custom.  I use the mortgage rate page on Interest.co.nz to get a quick overview of what the current rates are. They have all the banks on there with the exception of ANZ. I think their data feed for ANZ is broken. Overall we are aiming for a low 4% for a 2 year fixed. Let’s hope we can get it

Overall, we were positive for the month!

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