My monthly Savings Rate report: October 2020

Nothing happened! A strange thing to be excited about, right? Well, after quite some busy months, it’s a nice change of pace I’d say.
Though it’s not really true if I’m honest. I took up three weeks of on-call at work resulting in a nice bump in salary this month. So my statement really only applies to my expenses.

This month was the first month where I had to cover the entire rent as my wife doesn’t have an income. While this did impact the expenses a bit, due to a lack of any other major expenses this resulted a pretty solid savings rate.

This time around, nothing complex like pre-marital savings. Just a good old salary with a bonus for 3 weeks of on-call. I got  2,954.04 EUR in income this month.

Dividends

I received a nice dividend this month:

• Aedifica (09/10/2020): 120.00 EUR.

This brings the total for this year to 292.23 EUR.

Food and supplies

In terms of groceries, we didn’t do anything exciting spending 396.28 EUR. We ordered from Burger King once this month resulting in 25.80 EUR for restaurants. Spending in the other categories was limited at 15.68 EUR for other small stuff like some icecream. Putting it all together gives me 437.76 EUR on food and supplies. Almost exactly the same as last month.

Luxury

Next up are some luxury expenses. This expense consists of one big purchase. Because of the increase in Corona-cases we wanted to at least keep eating healthy. To do that we aspired to eat more home-made food such as soups, but we were missing a mixer to help in the kitchen.
We don’t have enough space for a big-ass kitchen robot and we don’t cook that much anyway, so we decided on a hand mixer. The perfect mix of convenience, price, and quality. We landed on the Braun Multmix 5 with all the accessories.

After intense use this past month, I can only recommend it. It was well worth the money.  We have made three soups, 2 banana pancakes mixes, chopped up a lot of onion, and kneaded some dough. All for 99.95 EUR (on 01/10/2020).

another luxury expense was The Caves of Han, I already purchased these tickets during the summer through Social Deals and finally used them at the beginning of October. I still had to pay for parking (6 EUR) but that was it. It was a wonderful trip and due to the time, it wasn’t all that busy.

Finally, I paid my monthly subscription for Spotify and Patreon (11.04 EUR). All three expenses together put me at 116.99 EUR for luxury expenses in October.

Online businesses

The last big category I want to detail is the expense for my blog. It’s relatively low at 108.18 EUR because it was minor support to further improve the blog in the long run.

Other expenses

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

• Person – 96.65 EUR:
  • 54.67 EUR for medical expenses: just like last month these were mandatory but not serious in the sense that wasn’t for a decease.
  • 41.98 EUR on a yearly subscription for my BMW X1: With this subscription, I can control my car remotely and preheat it during the coming winter months. Thinking about it, it probably makes more sense to have it under luxury.
• Banking and insurance – 4.32 EUR:
  • In reality, this should be higher but because I got a nice cashback through Visa it’s peanuts.
    • 15.72 EUR Home and fire insurance
    • 22.35 EUR for CM national health insurance
    • 33.10 EUR cashback from my VISA credit card + 0.65 EUR cashback from Keytrade shared card.

Adding it all up makes 1,476.85 EUR in total expenses for October. I’m left with 1476.19 EUR which gives me a Savings Rate of 1,476.19 EUR/2,954.04 EUR = 50.00%!