My monthly Savings Rate report: October 2019
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With this series I want to highlight my monthly effort to reach the highest possible Savings Rate. I provide a detailed account on how the month was both in terms of income and expenses that explains my reached Savings Rate. I will restart the series every year so I have two more left after this for 2019.
Please let me know if you like this format or if you’d do it differently.
Income
On the income side of things, it’s a very basic month. I only have my regular income from my day job. Ah, and I also found 5 euro on the street! That makes it a bit more atypical.
The euros received this month are 2819.92 + 77.07, and with the 5 euro found, I received a total of 2,901.99 EUR. What this figure hides is the slight shift in my salary.
I don’t have my 1st class train subscription anymore. I also lost the bike remuneration that I got from biking to and from the train station when I was still living at my parents. The “loss” of the 1st class sorta makes up for it. If you would look back at my income for this year (which I’ll be doing at the end of the year!) you likely won’t see a major change.
This level of income will unfortunately end in December. The last two months of this year will be the end of my 2800 – 2900 EUR net income, at least from my employer. As of January 2020 about 320 EUR will go to my salary car.
Expenses
My expenses were higher than expected yet again. In part due to extra purchases related to our home (417.01 EUR). Also food (355.76 EUR) and luxury (293.37 EUR) took a piece.
Housing
Food and groceries
This isn’t that bad because I’ve stopped purchasing snacks after work at the expensive in-station-grocery store. Of course, groceries for two is more expensive than for just me, so that came in at 233.84 EUR. The still high small snacks are actually because I still had my wallet containing more than 60 EUR which in reality isn’t the case so straightened that by substracting 40 EUR. I know I spend the cash on that kind of snacks but I don’t remember what exactly. The final total for food and groceries thus ends at 355.76 EUR.
Luxury
In the luxury department, the biggest expense was the hotel for our new year’s trip to Turkey. This was an idea of my girlfriend. Spending the new year and watching the firework in Istanbul. It also serves as our first anniversary celebration. The 232.07 EUR is my part of the hotel.
The other expenses such as entertainment are two cinema nights. The subscription fee contains three subscriptions: BasicFit (shared with gf), Patreon (which I cancelled), and Spotify. this month I also had a consumer magazine that I forgot to cancel after the free two-month trial. I ended up spending 10.29 EUR on it. The actual expenses were higher but I also substracted the cashback I get from my Visa credit card. All of that combined, plus the presents, gives me a total luxury expense of 293.37 EUR.
Unfortunately, I’ still not able to get back to my 70% let alone 75% savings rate. It’s a bit better than last months but definitly not as good as I wanted it to be. My hope is that I can at least get above 60% on average (where it is now ~59%).