Hmmm... I don't even know where to start. I haven't been in the mood to blog at all lately. I have stopped by few times a week to read other people's blog. But I haven't had much time to actually write and update my own blog. As a consequence we have over spent by a lot. Our 2010 challenge/budget is officailly over budget. I have actually already revised it for next year. We will try to go back to the 20K challenge. I hope this will be enough, but I can't predict how much more our utilities bill will go up by. As I was looking back to our spending this year, the gas bill has been crazy, I didn't even realised it until now. At the start of the year (note: this is our summer time, when we don't use as much gas) was only around $80, but our last bill for it was almost $250! Water and electricity has been going in the same trend.
Also it doesn't help that we have been going out so much. This the definitely the biggest item that we need to change next year. Reason for it to be so huge expense this month and last month is that we had relatives visiting us and we took them out a lot. So this was an unusual occurrence, we are hoping not have too much of this next year. We had a lot of people visiting us this year, more than usual.
We have also been spending a lot on other areas, we spent a bit this year on buying new furnitures and other "want" items. Example, I just recently bought a kindle. This was an item that I wanted when it first came out, but it wasn't really avaible here in Australia until mid last year. At that time I wasn't that happy about the price. But the new kindle is so much cheaper and now that the Australian dollar is in parity (and at time of buying, it was even above) with the US dollar. It is the best time to import it. I have been downloading a lot of free books, mostly classic books that are now past copywrite. I'm really loving the new kindle so I'm not as guilt-ridden about it (oh I'm so weak, justifying this right now...lol).
Anyway, we will most likely be over $1,000 over our 19K challenge. It is bad but if I look back 5 years or so ago we used to spend around $23-25K for these items. So it is still an improvement.
The good thing however about not blogging is I've been busy cleaning the house, and I have to say that it is now about 90% clear from all the clutter inside the house. I've only got the pantry and a closet to clean out. We are trying to eat as much of the stuff in the pantry so it gets clean. I am currently trying to tackle the garage. We will probably get someone to come and pick up the rubbish as soon as I'm done clearing out stuff we don't need anymore.
Hopefully after christmas we can start our renovation again. We decided to delay it because of DH new job. And now that christmas is just around the corner it is a bit risky to start one now, I don't want to deal with it during the crazy season.
I now feel better writing this blog, I just really need to get back to my routine. This is always what happen to me when I'm out of my routine, I end up over spending.
Now I need to update my sidebar.
Thanks for stopping by.
Update and Confession
November 11th, 2010 at 01:34 am
November 11th, 2010 at 03:15 am 1289445324
Good luck!
November 11th, 2010 at 01:55 pm 1289483721