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Archive for August, 2017

August 2017

August 31st, 2017 at 10:57 am

Overall spending for this month was $1,668.72. Four months in a row that we spent less than $2K per month which is great. I think September is going to be expensive though we will have a big water bill, there will be some annual fees attach to the next bill and property rates will again be due. This month we didn’t have any utilities due as well which helped the low spend month. Father’s day and some birthdays are on next month and there are already some invites to go out. Anyway, some individual items below:

Grocery – It was under budget and on the weekend we got some big items like a 20 kilo sack of rice and 1.5 kilo of Milo. We spent a total of $285.30 on grocery, almost $15 under budget.

Birthdays – My mother in-law and my mum’s birthday was on this month so we spent some money on gifts. Also I used up some of my allowance money; I’ve hardly spent any of that money this year. I took my mum and 5 of her friends for lunch on her birthday yesterday. We went for buffet lunch, 5 of them were seniors so we got good discounts for them. It was really good place especially for the price I was very impressed normally I’m not too keen on those type of places but I would definitely go back there again. It was for only $130.30 for 7 people.

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Books/Reading – I mentioned in one of my recent post that I don’t think I will be borrowing much books from the library but it seems like I’m actually wrong, I’ve actually borrowed few and some magazines as well.
33 The Back Road - Rachel Abbott (5 Aug)
34 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain (10 Aug)
35 The Taste of Fear - Jeremy Bates (13 Aug)
36 Six Frames of Thinking about Information - Edward de Bono (14 Aug)
37 Money Master the Game (7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom) - Tony Robbins (24 Aug)
38 Rich People Problems - Kevin Kwan (26 Aug)
39 Surrender - Helen Hardy (29 Aug)
40 Calico Joe - John Grisham (31 Aug)

Workout – I need to do better than 3 days a week.

Pay Raise kind of

August 24th, 2017 at 10:35 am

DH got notice that he will be getting a pay raise, it is only for 2.5% so just in line with CPI. He has given up getting a pay raise this year so I guess this was unexpected. Not much really but every bit helps.


Grocery - This week we spent $74.02. One more week left for the month and we’ve only spent $185, which left us $115. I have plan to stock up some things this coming weekend.


Fitness Tracker – Someone at DH work gave him 2 brand new fitness trackers. The guy bought that it for himself and his wife but it never showed up so he decided to cancel it and bought it somewhere else and now long after he got his money refunded they showed up in the mail. It seems like everyone at his team already have them except for DH so he offered it to him for a beer or something small of value just to cover the credit card fee that he incured for international purchased. DH was happy to do it. He bought him some chocolates since he loves them, not even $5 worth. And next time they go out for drinks DH will shout him a beer or two.

Quilt Cover and Clothes Shopping

August 15th, 2017 at 06:48 am

Our Saturday was filled with shopping which means spending money.


Grocery Shopping – This weekend we spend a total of $48.86 on our weekly food shopping. Spent $9.17 on meat, another whole chicken they are still on sale at Aldi and some pork with bones great for making soup which I kind of have a craving for at the moment. The weather was beautiful on Sunday so we actually barbequed the chicken. I butterfly the chicken and I made some peri-peri sauce to marinate it. It was yum and had enough for Monday lunch and dinner.


Manchester and Clothes Shopping – I wanted to get another quilt cover of our king size donna. For this sort of stuff I go to this store about 15 minutes away from our house. Not many people know or really care to shop at this place so I love shopping here. It is a shop were big shops, like Target and other department stores (Myer, Big W, etc.) dump their old stocks or when factories get too much in stock and the department stores don’t want them then they sale it at this store. A lot of the products are of good quality and heavily discounted. Most people tend to snob this place but I love it.


I got the quilt cover for $39.99, the initial price for it at the original store was $150. It’s good quality and has two patterns/designs that are reversible.


While there we found that they were having sales on suits. They originally have them for sale at $79.99 (at other department stores these would have been sold for around $200+) but had them further discounted down to $49.99. Just could not passed up on those. DH mainly wear suits for work so they get used a lot. We then took it to seamstress to get the pants shorten, and that was $12.


Also got a couple of other clothing items while there, we haven’t bought anything for 3 months. All up we spent $132 at the shop. I budgeted $720 for clothing this year we’ve spent $445 so far.


Lunch out – We had Vietnamese for $26 for couple of dishes. We just wanted try out this new restaurant, it was okay but probably won’t be back.


Wine – Bought some more wine, 13 bottles all up for $89.30 (just under $6.90 a bottle). That should last us for the rest of the year. I think we roughly spend around $150 to $200 a year on alcohol so this is about par to what we always been spending in previous years.


New Library Card – My old library card (in our local library) was issued about 15 years ago and I haven’t used it for probably 7-8 years? So basically the new fancy computer systems they have these days don’t recoginsed it. Last weekend when DH went to the library and shown the librarian his old card they kind of laugh at him because none of them recognised it. The guy that was serving him showed it to the other people there because they were really fascinated by it. Anyway, I don’t know how much I will used the library because I already got so many books to read as it is. I will probably mainly borrow non-fiction books because most of my books are fictions.


*Currently listening to Trouble is a Friend by Lenka, she’s an Australian singer and song writer.

1st Week of August

August 9th, 2017 at 06:05 am


Grocery – We bought mainly staples, fruits and vegetables this weekend. All up it totaled $61.45. We actually end up buying a couple of whole chickens because they were really cheap at Aldi, it was only $3 a kilo, for two chickens we paid $9.76. We also got a big block of cheese (1kg) for $6.


Weekend – We occupied the rest of the weekend mostly reading, listening to music (mainly myself) and podcasts. DH is currently obsessed with podcasts, personal finance in particular. Since we paid off the house and most of our money is now put into investments/savings he has really taken interests. It is more fun than paying off debt. It has now become a new hobby for him, he is reading a lot of personal finance books too. He even went to the library on Sunday afternoon to borrow PF books, it really is amazing.


New Headphone – DH bought a new headphone on ebay for $25.30. His current one is broken from listening to too much podcasts, he is currently using an old crappy one in the main time.

July 2017

August 3rd, 2017 at 03:04 am

July was a very good low spend month.

Total spending was $1,336.31

Groceries – Total for grocery bill this month was $293.33. We actually came under. DH did great doing the shopping on the weekend. He stuck to the list and came under $40.

We still have some odd items in the freezer that I’m trying to use up before stocking up on meat again. The other night I found a whole fish which we had to go with some leftovers and then last night I cooked a couple of gourmet sausages for dinner. There has been a lot of leftover bread that get shoved in the fridge before they go off, we have accumulated a bit of those, that DH on the weekend used some of them to make bread and butter pudding with frozen blueberries and chopped up dried dates. Another thing we tend to end up collecting in the freezer are odd ends of cheeses, last week I made macaroni and cheese out of those, I think I ended up using 5 different kinds of cheese. DH really liked it and we didn’t die from it so bonus!

So I probably won’t do a big shop for another 2 weeks. We tend to always start the month with big shopping trip but I think we can hold it off this month. We always then end up with a tight budget towards the end of the month; I want to try to delay that this month. Grocery is probably really the only item in the budget that I try to be as strict as possible (I guess entertainment/going out to eat is another category that I make sure to be tight as well) because it has a great possibility of getting out of hand if I don’t watch it closely. Most of the other categories in our budget are mostly just happen automatically these days.

Main reasons for the low spend month:
Property Rates – We pay for property rates (tax) every month for ten months in a year, July and August are the month we don’t have to pay.

No Restaurant – This wasn’t planned at all but I’m glad, BUT we did spend a lot on takeaway food and this has been the trend in the last 3 months. So we need to rein this in from now on.

Household Items – We only spend $80 in under this category this month, the electric blanket, new trolley and some LED light bulbs.


*****o00o*****


Decluttering – Did very well this month with the help of our annual rubbish collection.

Workout – I have been bad. The cold weather is kicking my butt and I’m struggling, just don’t have much motivation to do anything physical. Also my ankle has been sore last week (this is probably because I haven’t been working out regularly), it’s nothing too dramatic really but it was still bothering me so I had to make sure to give it a rest. I was able to do a couple sessions of Abs workout last week, 30 mins all up, that was it. Today was the first time I was able to do a full workout for over a week.


Reading – One book a week, although that Thomas Jefferson book took me 3 months to read.

28 Sycamore Row - John Grisham (6 Jul)
29 Soulless, The Girl in the Box - Robert J. Crane (11 Jul)
30 Thomas Jefferson, The Art of Power - Jon Meacham (16 Jul)
31 Scaredy Cat - Mark Billingham (22 Jul)
32 Early Retirement Extreme - Jacob Lund Fisker (31 Jul)


That’s it for July 2017.
* Currently listening to Fleet Foxes, new discovery of mine… I know I’m like a decade or so late, I tend to be slow to these kinds of things. I’m trying to experience new things.
* So on that note – Song of the week for me is “Ragged Wood” by Fleet Foxes.