My monthly Savings Rate report: January 2021

A new year, a new start to my monthly Savings Reports. Will this new start be a better one than last year or will it be barely positive like last year? time to dive into my January expenses and find out!
Unlike last year, we didn’t go on a holiday, so at least that big expense drops. Because of Corona we also didn’t visit family so gifts were limited as well. As for the income side of things, that was very good as well.

Marriage quotient

My income received a boost again thanks to the on-call I did at the end of December/the beginning of January. On top of that, I finally received my tax benefit for being married. My monthly net income will be bigger thanks to the so-called marriage quotient. Since my wife is still searching for a job in HR or educational sciences -which is almost impossible to get without Dutch- she has no income.

If your partner has no professional income, like my wife, the taxman attributes 30% of my income to my wife’s, with a maximum of 11,090 euros (the fiscal year 2021). However! The benefit has no effect on social security contributions since social security contributions are calculated on the income before the marriage quotient is applied. As such it’s a bit complicated to calculate. I had an acquaintance do it and according to his calculations, I would receive about 350 EUR per month.

In reality, I now saw indeed an increase of about 367.74 EUR. Though it still depends on how your employer deducts the taxes.
I know mine deducts a bit too much resulting in always receiving about 300 EUR in taxes.

So how much was my income in January? Well, I got 3,211,68 EUR which is very close to last month’s income. Of this, 8,89 EUR is interest from my savings accounts. The remaining 3,202.79 EUR, unlike last month, will now be my net every month besides the times I’m not on-call.

The situation for my wife hasn’t changed yet. No job so no income. At the moment, everything is covered by one salary and thus we receive the marriage quotient. I did promise my wife I would transfer 250 EUR of my salary to her personal checking account as the benefit is “thanks” to her not having an income. It’s only fair she gets to have some “personal” money.

Dividends

I received my first dividends of 2021 this month:

• 31/12/2020 – USDV – 21.34
• 01/14/21 – TSM – 3.68
• 01/27/21 – IUS3 – 25.34

Combining everything gives me 50.36 EUR for January.

Food and supplies

Next up are the groceries done in January. We ended up spending a lot more on groceries than expected. 488.65 EUR for 2 is a bit better than last month -it would be really bad if weren’t-  but still relatively high. I don’t really have an explanation for it besides the cravings of a pregnant wife. We definitely have been getting more snacks compared to last year.

“Eating out” was limited to some extra fries and ‘frikandel’ (8.10 EUR). The snacks (31.53 EUR) were at the local Delhaize after we did some cleaning at my grandma’s place. The result is 531.08 EUR on food and supplies.

City and government

Surprising enough, it’s not my personal costs that are my next most expensive category, but it’s city and government for one reason. I don’t know if I ever mentioned this, but last summer my car got towed for being parked on a spot that was going to get cleaned the next morning. I paid the fine, but I never received the towing bill… till now. 181.50 EUR! Yikes.

Person

Medical bills (66.22 EUR) for the pregnancy and underwear for me (51.96 EUR) were the expenses in this category. We spend 108.74 EUR in total.

Other expenses

The rest of my expenses were relatively minimal.
A quick summary:

• Banking – 52.73 EUR:
  • Health insurance: 35.21 EUR
  • DVV Family insurance: 15.72 EUR
  • Cashback: +3.20 EUR
  • Yearly Beobank Visa fee: 5 EUR
• Luxury – 11 EUR:
  • A subscription on Patreon and Spotify.

Summing it all up for a total expense of 2,553.81 EUR! I’m left with 657.87 EUR which gives me a Savings Rate of 657.87 EUR/3,211.68 EUR = 20.48%.

So yeah, thank my lucky stars that I got a tax benefit. I am curious about next month as I will then have paid for the rest of the bed.