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Saturday, 8 March 2008

Analysing your budget

How often do you do a budget for the month, write it down or post it on your blog, and then realise that you got it so wrong? I do most months. I usually under estimate stuff and end up overspending. I'm not sure there has ever been a month where I've stuck to my budget completely, or had the figures 100% correct.

I need to do work in this area. I think that there are still big savings to be had in my (our) expenses, personal and household, so I'm going to start analysing each one.

Firstly though I want to re visit my March budget and see where savings could be made.

Loan payments £490.48 - Fixed amount
Bills account £600.00 - Need to break this down individually
Grocery and Fuel £250 - Variable, but needs to be a fixed amount
Investments £100 - Fixed amount
Haircuts £30
- Reduced to £25.40, £16.40 for cut and blow dry with junior stylist, £6.00 for an eyebrow wax and £3 tip
Sports subs £20 - Reduced to £10, some games cancelled
Daughter mobile £37 - Fixed with 12 month contract left
Magazine Sub £17.90 - Variable, already reduced annual costs but could cancel all subscriptions
Daughters 21st £70 - Reducing to £53
Meal Out for above £60 - Fixed amount
Misc £25
- Variable, but should reduce to £20 per month
Loan over payments £257.93 - Fixed but can increase :)

Doing this exercise has found another £31.60 snowflake to my loans.

The magazine subscription has already left my bank account so no saving there. The meal out for my daughters 21st is at a Chinese restaurant with a fixed price menu so no overspend there. The miscellaneous £25 is my fun money. This is for the occasional book, which I could get from a library, the occasional coffee or anything else that keeps me sane. I will reduce to £5 a week though from now on.

Now I need to work on all the household bills.

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