My monthly Savings Rate report: November 2020
Another calm month. Both in terms of expenses and income. It will make for a rather concise monthly overview.
I am currently on-call again but because week 3 of my on-call is the first week of December, I will only get paid at the off the month so expect to see a bigger salary by the end of the year. For now, it’s my base salary.
Just like last month, all of our two-person expenses are covered by one salary. Luckily it’s a decent one, meaning I could still save a bit after paying rent and other monthly returning expenses like groceries.
Income
Like two months ago, a good old salary without an on-call bonus (that’s for next month). I received 2,654.85 EUR in income this month.
Dividends
I received no dividend this month.
Expenses
Home management and ownership
My largest expense is without a doubt the monthly rent (645 EUR) plus the interest I have to pay on the already borrowed amount (110.81 EUR). As I didn’t buy anything extra for the apartment, these 2 expenses were the only ones in this category bringing the total to 755.81 EUR for November.
Food and supplies
Next up are the groceries for the past month. We did end up spending more on groceries than expected. 452.47 EUR for 2 is quite a lot, so I will try to reduce this in December. I’m curious if we’ll be able to bring it down.
“Eating out” happened twice this month through Deliveroo. Once fries from the local ‘fritkot’ and once from Burger King totaling 32.21 EUR on food and supplies. Finally, I bought one cake to gift to my parents (16.50 EUR). The result is 501.18 EUR on food and supplies.
Person
Medical bills were the only expenses in this category. We spend 191.16 EUR on checks for a new family member and flu shots.
Luxury
My final big expense category this month was Luxury. I bought a blood pressure machine (Omron M4 Intelli IT) to do at-home-measurements because they were relatively high for my wife when we were in the hospital.
I recommend it if you are getting older or, in my case, need to perform frequent blood pressure measurements for monitoring. Using Bluetooth, you can connect to the Omron app to receive a visualization of your measurements over time and instant-access during a doctor’s visit.
Another purchase in the luxury department was something to help kill time. I bought an extension pack of a game I already had: Cities Skylines (19.95 EUR).
Even though I know the lottery is not really a solid plan towards FIRE, I do sometimes play just for the heck of it. You never know. 50 EUR went into win-for-life tickets. Didn’t win for life 🙁
Ik speel af en toe Win For Life. Nooit veel, gemiddeld komt het neer op 20 EUR/maand. Ik vind het wel leuk. Dat gevoel van een krasje verwijderd te zijn van winst. Hoe laag de kans ook. Maar na een aantal spelletjes stop ik omdat ik snel terugkeer naar de realiteit 😂
— fightToFIRE (@fightToFIRE1) November 17, 2020
Last but not least, I paid my Spotify and Patreon subscription (11.05 EUR). Adding it all up gives me 162.66 EUR.
Other expenses
The rest of my expenses were minimal. A quick summary:
- Banking and insurance – 24.74 EUR:
- The basic fair of home and fire, and medical insurance with a dash of cashback.
- 15.72 EUR Home and fire insurance
- 10.36 EUR for company health insurance
- 1.34 EUR cashback from my VISA credit card and 20 cents from Keytrade.
- The basic fair of home and fire, and medical insurance with a dash of cashback.
- Kids – 9.95 EUR:
- Yep, you read that right. Well, if you follow me on twitter you’d have seen it already. We are expecting (but more on that another time)! For the little one we already purchased some anti-slip socks to promulgate the joyous news.
- Online business – 6.01 EUR:
- A small amount to try and get my Pinterest off the ground. I only get a few clicks more.
All the expenses
The bottom line
Summing it all up for a total expense of 1,651.51 EUR. I’m left with 1,003.34 EUR which gives me a Savings Rate of 1,651.51 EUR/2,654.85 EUR = 37.79%!
Well done! I still don’t get how you manage to spend so little 🙂 I can almost always think of something I need/want, and sometimes I can change my mind, but sometimes I go ahead and buy it 😛
Keep up the good work!
Hey Marc Moore,
Thanks but so little?
Haha, here I though I still spend too much. To be fair it’s also thanks to my hobbies. I like to workout so I can easily do this by going running and using bodyweight exercises so that doesn’t cost money.
Of course I would love to go biking again but I don’t have the space at the moment to store a race bike safely so I haven’t repaired it or bought a new one.
We go to Lidl and Aldi as much as possible, sometimes Spar or Carrefour so we can still safe money there. We live in a 40m² apartment so that helps with keeping crap out. Finally, when I do plan to buy something I think and rethink my purchase, not always I have to confess, but usually it prevents buying stuff I don’t really need.
Something I still really want is a decent sound system but since it’s not urgent, I’ve been able to postpone it for a couple of years now 😛
Congrats on the wonderful news!!! Excited to read more about it in the near future.
And pretty impressive savings rate again. My total monthly expenditures are at around EUR1000 for one person so this is good motivation to trim that slightly. I should also aim to just keep postponing my wants!
Keen to see how your December post will look like. I often struggle keeping things in line during the holiday season.
Greetings from Austria,
Mira
Hello Mira,
Thanks! It was a busy couple of months, that’s for sure 😉 . I had hoped to finish my writing before I published my monthly savings rate, but unfortunately, it’s taking a bit longer. Look forward to it.
Find small improvements one week or month at a time. Sometimes I also find small changes that can improve my Savings Rate. For example, I always tend to get a certain energy drink because of it’s taste, but it’s 1.38 EUR/can. While it’s delicious and it’s the zero version, I realized I didn’t need it and I was starting to get too addicted to it, so as of December I decided to drop it resulting in a saving of about 30 EUR per month.
Greetings,
Mr.FightToFIRE