Category Archives: budget

Job upgrade & budget review plans

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Well I was successful at the job interview earlier in the week and I’ll start my new position in a few weeks. 

Now that its settled and I’m starting to get some more detailed information on some of the projects I’ll be working on.
 I’m actually starting to look forward to having a bit of a change. 

 I expect it will be a very busy year ahead though as the long awaited restructure is going ahead so there will be job losses and job changes ahead. 

So I’ve decided that for the moment I will just be paying the minimum on the mortgage and stashing my cash until the dust settles at work with all these changes. 

I am hoping its all done by Easter and then we can reassess what we need to do financially.

In the meantime I’m going to do a complete review of our expenses and look at where we can make some savings. We’re doing reviews of our budgets on Simple Savings this month. 

Some of us are using this review of budgeting thats using 10 categories of spending drawn from the ABS Household expenditure survey to review spending, so I’ve signed up for that.

Do you budget? How often do you review your spending?

“ A budget is telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went” Dave Ramsey

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

A quick update

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Its been an interesting week. I must admit my concentration and focus is not the greatest after three months working from home, I find I’m quite easily distracted  and my concentration is not as good as usual, so I think it will take me a bit to adjust to being back at work. My boss has said to come back gradually which is good. I’ll go in for a few hours on Monday to start with.

Financially we’ve had a few wins. I got paid $150 grocery voucher to do a 45 minute survey yesterday so that was a win. Grocery prices are still up so this is a big help. I’m just accepting that its costing more at the moment with the pandemic and its not worth stressing over.

DH will be going back to full time work next month. Even though he has enjoyed being part-time, it was never his choice to reduce his hours. So him having a full time income again will be good and help us reach our goals a bit easier.

In the meantime I’m trying to keep warm, we’ve had some really cold, frosty mornings here this week, focusing on one day at a time, and avoiding too much news.

Stay safe XX

Back to YNAB Budgeting

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Well I’ve had a really good morning doing our new budget. I feel like I’ve spring-cleaned’ the finances and I’m ready to knuckle down and go hard on the mortgage payoff again.

I have gone back to using YNAB for budgeting. I can see how my spending has crept up over the last six months or so and while the credit card was always paid off in full every month, it was too easy to just spend a little extra here, there and eventually everywhere.  I think using YNAB will get me back on track.

I’m also going to stop using the credit card! By using the card we would delay payment and that money would sit in our offset account longer – lowering the interest. But I’ve paid it down to $0 this morning and don’t plan on using it unless we are travelling or its an emergency.

Speaking of travelling, we have cancelled our cruise for the end of the year. We did lose some money but as someone with several health conditions, I am not willing to risk travelling until the coronavirus is a bit more understood and under control. I think we’ll just sit out overseas travel this year.

We’ve got the craziest stockpiling of toilet paper going on in Australia at the moment! People fighting over it, one man getting tasered and all the supermarket aisles are empty. I’m not sure why its toilet paper. I bought a 32 pkt last week for .22 cents a roll because it was on special – (which is when I always buy it). Our pantry and freezer is all full so no need to buy anything extra at the moment.

Are people panicking about Coronavirus where you live? Are they stockpiling anything?