My Simple Financial Plan

Grocery = Week 39 - $146.92 and Week 40 - $81.20

Dentist = $450

Just found out about losing 6 months’ worth of blog entries, that sucks.

Anyway we have been away camping - spent $245.45, a very reasonable price we cooked all but one meal.

September total expense was $2598.63. Grocery was only $201.96.

I think I will skip most of my goal update in this entry, I’m not sure it’s worth it. But goal 1 is now pretty much done at least it will be by the end of this month.

Reading – didn’t get much reading done in September and most likely not make it to 200 books but it’s ok.
109 The Waiting Game - Sheila Bugler (2 Sep) - Audio
110 Financial Freedom - Grant Sabatier (3 Sep)
111 Retirement Planning in Eight Easy Steps - Joel Kranc (7 Sep) - Audio
112 Falling - Chris Mooney (9 Sep)
113 All Things Nice - Sheila Bugler (10 Sep) - Audio
114 The Dumb Things Smart People Do with their Money - Jill Schlesinger (12 Sep) - Audio
115 The Broken Man - Josephine Cox (17 Sep)
116 The Blind Side - Michael Lewis (21 Sep) - Audio
117 The Rosie Effect - Graeme Simsion (29 Sep) - Audio

Fixing the fridge part III – DH had another go at fixing the fridge, this time he change the heating element thingy (can’t remember what it is called), he apparently check it and it showed that it was dead. The part cost $40 this time. I think he is now 90% sure it has fixed it.

Groceries = $94.40 bought extra for an upcoming camping trip.
Other than grocery shopping we didn’t spend on anything else all weekend. We spend the weekend getting our camper trailer ready and clean out the garage a bit. I also did some tidying up in the garden and cleaning the car interior.

March total = $2,779.75

Groceries - $276.35 (under)
Utilities - $330.49
Internet – DH prepaid our internet again for $780.
Car repair and service - $382.26
Entertainment - $136.89 (under but just)
Clothes - $114.45, DH bought new running shoes and I bought some clothes.

Financials-

*Put as much money we possibly can into Investments (at least $40K).
We are 25% done, so we are tracking well so far.

*Save $3K for Holiday money.
N/A

*Save $5K for "The Challenge"
March NSDs were 10 days, so $30 into the challenge. Nothing more this month. Total so far for this challenge is $394.00

Other –

*Read 200 books.

22. Your Brain at Work - David Rock (1 Mar)
23. Crazy House - James Patterson & Gabrielle Charbonnet (3 Mar) - Audio
24. Everyone Can Write - Howard Gelman (5 Mar)
25. Tripwire - Lee Child (8 Mar) - Audio
26. The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat - Oliver Sacks (10 Mar)
27. Healing with Iodine - Dr. Mark Sircus (13 Mar)
28. The Flower Girls - Alice Clark-Platts (13 Mar) - Audio
29. Peak Performance - Brad Stulberg & Steve Magness (17 Mar)
30. Handwiring Happiness - Rick Hanson (17 Mar) - Audio
31. Top Dog - Jens Lapidus (19 Mar) - Audio
32. Now You See Her - Heidi Perks (23 Mar)
34. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (27 Mar)
35. Homo Deus - Yuval Noah Harari (29 Mar)
36. The Break - Katherena Vermette (30 Mar) - Audio
37. Long Lost - Harlan Coben (31 Mar)

*Continue Learning Spanish.
Yes

* Wake-up early workout and or meditate 5 times a week.
Yes!

*Blogging once per week.
Yes

*Continue Garden/Landscaping.
Some

*Continue Decluttering.
Very little

*Learn to Draw
Need to do some.

Grocery - For the week was $58.35.

Filters - Got new water filters for $42.26 in total.

Movie - we had couple of movie passes for the Gold Class also it came with food voucher. We watched “Us” and end up spending $4.50 for extra drink.

Another relaxing weekend.

We had another quiet weekend.

Grocery = $68.15

Clothes = I actually went and bought some new clothes, $34.45.

Eating out = $27.80

We had beautiful weather on the weekend. We had a picnic and went for long walks.

Grocery = $55.60
Fuel = $41.55
Eating out = $43.70


This didn't work yesterday.

I wrote this two days ago but couldn't log on.

Good news, it wasn’t as bad as it sounded. They found the fault in the power steering pressure switch so they replaced with a new one. Also the intake pipe needed to be repaired and put in some oil. They also did the usual service since it would have been due next month anyway. All up it cost $382.26, overall not as bad as we expected it to be.

We had car problem all weekend and because we had a long weekend DH couldn’t take it to the mechanic until this morning. I’m hoping it won’t cost too much and they can actually fix it.
Because of the car we cancelled our plan to go out on Sunday, we had planned to go to the farmer’s market again and we also had planned to go into the city. Instead me just spend some of our time at our local park, we got to watched a game of cricket.
However, we did chanced the car Saturday night were we had to be at a friend’s house for her daughter’s first birthday.

Grocery – since we didn’t want to drive the car too much we just walked to the store, which is just across the park. We went twice, Sunday and Monday, and took a backpack with us to help carry the groceries. The total of it was $31.65, I guess this is positive thing, and I managed to score some nice sales on meat.

Electricity – I actually tried to blog about this few days ago, it was a total fail. I actually tried to post a picture of our statement. It didn’t work to how I wanted it to come out and I just gave up on it, eventually. We got our statement for the billing period of 4 of Dec 2018 to 3 of Mar 2019 for a total of $93.20 credit. I can’t remember the breakdown of it now, but it was around $45 credit for this bill and it got added to last bill of $48 credit. We did really well considering we used it a great deal around Christmas time.

Coffee grinder – the other day DH ordered a coffee grinder online for $68, including postage. We have wanted to get one for a while now and we’ve also dried a bit of our herbs from the garden that might be good to have one to use for it.

We didn’t do much and I guess we had an in forced staycation on our long weekend. For some reason, I don’t even know how it happened but I ended watching a lot of Youtube. Particularly, the current politics in the US, this is usually not an interest of mind but I do like history of politics though. Anyway, I ended up in a rabbit hole about the current congresswoman from New York and then about the New Green Deal. Oh wow, very interesting. I also, watched a bit about what is currently happening in Canada. The word socialism got mentioned a lot, and it seemed like a lot of university students are really embracing it. This is interesting to me, here in Australia we tend to be few years behind the current trend, I think it used to be a decade behind but now with social media it is a bit quicker.

I also watched some videos about bullet journals, I have never journaled before and I think this might be a good one for me to have. I find that this is more suited to my personality. I always write things down but they tend to just be in a note book or just some random piece of paper. I think this will help me be more organised and have everything in one spot.

That was longer than expected.

We had a heatwave so we didn’t get to do much on the weekend.

Grocery - $54.91

New Shoes - DH needed new running shoes, so he got one for $80 on sale with the original price of $120.

Toaster Oven – Aldi had them for $35, so we got one.

Total for the month = $1,326.85
February is usually a low spend month for us even without trying.

Grocery = $310.61, we are over and I don’t really know why. I think it’s time to tighten our belts again with our grocery spending.

Entertainment = $125.89, under and I‘ve decided to put $10 into our challenge. Also put another $24 for 8 NSDs in Feb.

Other expenses worth nothing was for my license renewal, dog annual registration, and other personal and medical items.

Financials-

*Put as much money we possibly can into Investments (at least $40K).
We did very well in Feb.

*Save $3K for Holiday money.
We did not spend any money on this in Feb. We might look at doing something for Easter.

*Save $5K for "The Challenge"
As mentioned above, I added $34 dollars in Feb. I actually did a day-trade in Feb but that was to only see if my trading account still works. I made $10 and I decided not to bother putting that into this account. Speaking of account, I found out that I can open a sub-account in one of my bank account/trading account. I have only ever used this account for my long-term trading, but it does have an account for my cash and apparently I can have a sub-account. I just need to transfer cash into it.


Other –

*Read 200 books.
12 Before the Devil Breaks You - Libba Bray (5 Feb) - Audio
13 Moonwalking with Einstein - Joshua Foer (8 Feb)
14 How we Learn - Benedict Carey (12 Feb)
15 Killing Floor - Lee Child (14 Feb) - Audio
16 The Power of your Subconscious Mind - Joseph Murphy Ph.D. (18 Feb)
17 A Mind for Numbers - Barbara Oakley Ph.D. (20 Feb)
18 Linchpin - Seth Godin (22 Feb) - Audio
19 The Organized Mind - Daniel J. Levitin (25 Feb)
20 Night - Elie Wiesel (26 Feb)
21 Die Trying - Lee Child (28 Feb) - Audio

*Continue Learning Spanish.
Yes - I have also been watching some Spanish shows on Netflix (we installed Netflix again the other week)

* Wake-up early workout and or meditate 5 times a week.
It has been so hard to work out when the weather is so hot, around 36C (almost 100 Fahrenheit), 4 days in a row in that temperature last week. Sleeping has been hard.

*Blogging once per week.
I need to do better here.

*Continue Garden/Landscaping.
Too bloody hot, I just had been trying to keep the plants that we have now alive. There hasn’t been rain for over 2 months now.

*Continue Decluttering.
We took another couple of bags to charity.

*Learn to Draw
I’ve been learning to sketch a bit; I’m bad a it.

We didn’t spend or do much on the weekend. I finished that online course that I started last month about 10 days ago. I really enjoyed it, and I decided to do another mini-course on the weekend. So, most of my time was spent doing that, but we did go out to do some grocery shopping and also went for a couple hours walk with our dog.

Grocery = $71.22

Annual Dog Registration Fee = $49.00