I tried to make a dentist appointment for this month but they don't have any available on Saturdays until next month. So we need to wait another month for our dental check up and cleaning.

This dentist is through our private health insurance (NIB), they have a Dental Care Centre in the city. According to their current deal, I should get my dental check up for free but I think DH will have to pay some because he used up a lot of his rebate earlier this year when he got injured.

Also by going by 30th of Sept we can go in the draw to win a trip to New Zealand. That would be a bonus.

I'm just really hoping that this dentist will be better than the last one that I went to last year. He was hopeless, my teeth felt so bad and it really hurt too. I had a filling put in but he didn't smooth it out properly, I could feel it with my tongue for few weeks. I decided to never go back there again. And the reason why I haven't seen a dentist for over a year now. I just hope this dentist will be more professional.

Our dishwasher is broken and it is time to get a new one, there is no point in getting it fix. It's about 11 years old and I think there are more efficient ones in the market now a days. I'm not planning to get a new one until the end of the year sale. This way we got few months to really research it. Washing dishes by hand for few months doesn't bother me at all. I'm budgeting around $800 -$1000 (australian) for it, I'm willing to pay a bit for a really good one.

Our Prime Minister just got ousted by his party and now we have a woman PM. It is a very interesting time for our country. We will most likely have a federal election before the year end.

This has obviously been on TV all day and I've just been glued to it.


Financially, I can't wait to finalise this month's numbers. One more week.

It is currently 12:30am (Sunday morning), I'm staying up this late because I am currently watching the world cup (Aus v Ghana). I really don't know why I'm up this late, I'm not even really into soccer that much and really Australia has got no hope at all. But Dh is making me so I thought to may as well spend some time here. I've really got nothing to report. Today we went hiking for about 3 hours by a river about 1/2 an hour away from our house. We took food with us and had a picnic. We did however spent some money on coffee and chips afterwards which will come out from our allowances. We also stopped by at a nearby winery, I actually like some of their wines and bought 1 bottle. DH also bought a bottle of their tawny, he sometimes have some of this type of drink at night, it helps him relax.

Tomorrow, I'm thinking of going to the movies. I should really be painting that ceiling but I've kind of lost interest in it. It's probably too cold at the moment for painting anyway. I will probably change my mind about it again tomorrow. Geez, I'm just rambling on now it might be time to go to bed.

We got up really late this morning because we stayed up until 2am watching the soccer world cup game of South Africa v Mexico. When I got up it was actually very sunny, although looking outside the ground is wet and there were some dark clouds in the distance. So, we made the decision to go out today instead of tomorrow. We took corned beef sandwich, hard boiled eggs and other snacks. It actually rained a bit on our way there but once we got there the sun was out again. This place we went to specialise more on native Australian animals. We got to watch a live show about Birds of Prey, seeing a wedgetail eagle flying just inches above our heads was really cool.

Here are a couple of photos I took - enjoy:



These birds are amazing!



Afterwards we stopped by at a couple of wineries for wine tasting, always a bonus when visiting the Yarra Valley.

Here in Australia, we got a 3-day weekend because it is the Queen's Birthday(funny thing is that her birthday is actually in April!) but any excuse to have a day off from work is fine by me.

We are thinking of going away for a day trip to one of the zoo/wild life place in our state. It won't cost us a thing this time because earlier this year we bought a year pass that allow us entry to some of the main zoos in Australia. We are thinking of bringing our own food so this shouldn't cost us a thing except for gas. The only thing that is not very good at the moment is the weather, it has been very cold and has been raining all week and there are more to come tomorrow. Hopefully, we can go on Sunday. If the weather doesn't clear up I don't think I would want to go. We will probably just go to the movies, we haven't been for so long and I also got few free tickets, some we got from christmas and my recent birthday.

Other thing that I plan to do this weekend is to prune some trees around the house and maybe go to a nursery to buy a fruit tree to plant. I also want to start cleaning the study ceiling for hopefully painting it sometime next week. It's a small area so it shouldn't take long. I guess the hard part will probably be moving the stuff out of the room so they don't get covered in paint.

And of course we also need to do our usual grocery shopping, and would like to do some cooking as well. And I would also like to do some more stock research. I actually did some today, I might blog about it over the weekend.

Reading through this list it seems a lot, well we will just try to get through it.

At this stage we will probably have about $1,800 - $2000 extra this month. Which we call as money into "savings". Starting this month we were going to put this money into our mortgage as extra payments. However, at the moment the stock market is looking good for an entry. So at this stage, I'm thinking of buying more shares instead of paying the mortgage. DH doesn't mind either way.

I guess it doesn't really matter. Our big 5 year goals at the moment is to hopefully pay off the mortage in the next 5 years or at least have enough cash in the savings to pay it off (this goal is really ambitious but doable we really work hard at it) and to also have $100K worth of stocks not including what's in our retirement/superannuation funds. So, either way we are still working towards our goal.

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Right now I got corned beef cooking in the slow cooker. I will roast some vegies later to go with it for dinner. It's over a kilo so we will probably have it for few days. I am looking forward to having it in a sandwich for lunch tomorrow. yumm.

Our weekend was spent grocery shopping. I wanted to cook something special instead of going out to eat. I decided to make seafood paella. I ended up spending a bit on seafood, we got some prawns, calamari, fish, mussels and also got a dozen oysters. The oysters were made into kilpatrick. I think we spent a bit over $30 on seafoods alone. Luckily we already got the stuff I need for the paella including the spanish rice and saffron. I also used some of that chicken stock I made few days ago.

I only used half of the mussels and fish, so I also cooked mussels by itself and made the left over fish into Thai fish cakes, yummy!

So, Saturday night we had a lovely dinner of paella and a bottle of wine.

Today I think we might have company for dinner, I'm thinking of making meatloaf.

I got the day off today so I though I would do some cooking. I had a whole chicken in the freezer which is taking too much room so I though I should use it up. I had all other ingredients at hand and also managed to picked a handfull of vegies from the garden (capsicum, beans, and parsley). I ended up cooking the butter chicken by using the chicken breasts and the rest I made into casserole. The casserole is in the slower cooker at the moment. I also made some chicken stock out of the carcass. I will probably make soup out of it on the weekend. I also cooked some rice to go with the butter chicken for dinner tonight.

I don't know why I stopped doing this, I used to do pre-cooking a lot in the past. I've been really lazy about it this year. I've got no doubt this will help us cut down on spending a bit this month. And you know what it saves me time too. Most things were done in just over an hour and that was including the cleaning up. The rest is just waiting for things to actually cook.

Last night, DH and I talked about trying to have a no eating out this month, except for couple of time when we are invited to something already. One of it will be this Saturday, I don't think we need to spend money on food though. Pre-cooking meals should really help with this, I think we will get 5-6 meals out of today's cooking. Some will be put in the freezer.

Saturday morning, DH and I went to my bank to deposit couple of check both were stock dividends. The line was as always in that bank. After we went to another bank to open a new joint account, finally there is a bank is Australia that offer no monthly fees for a classic saving account. Never in my life have I encounter one. The process of opening one didn’t take that long at all, but the waiting to see the lady took over half an hour. The guy before us took FOREVER! He won’t stop talking to her about goodness what, and she obviously didn’t want to be rude to him. Hopefully, by July I won’t have to pay anymore bank fee.

Saturday afternoon, we went to Aldi to get milk, eggs and bread then we went to another shop to get fruits and vegetables. We got something for DH’s new hobby, it cost couple hundred dollars and it will be his early b-day, xmas gift, etc for this year. We also went window shopping...

Sunday, we decided to get a new TV, I know crazy right? I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned here that we been wanting to get a decent tv for more than 5 years now. The last tv set we got was worth $150, it was a no name brand, 20inch CRT tv (no fancy thing like widescreen or digital). Because it's not widescreen we cannot see some of the stuff that's on tv. Also in Australia everything is going to be in digital soon, so the old tv will not work unless you have set top box to convert it. And the one we got before that was a 2nd hand one worth $100, I think it was probably made in the 80’s. So, in the last 5years or so we’ve thought about getting a good 21st century TV. We both didn’t like the LCDs and Plasma because of how much electricity it uses. Few years ago I read about LED which is more energy efficient. So we waited and waited and waited because we also were not going to buy it until the price is right for us. Well, anyway on Sunday I guess everything aligned for us. We managed to negotiate the price down by quite a bit and we also got some extra free stuff with it. We are both very happy with our purchase.

DH went to his last physio today, thank goodness coz it cost $55 a pop and that's after our private health insurance pay for some of it. DH is still trying to get reimburse for all this medical expense from work. I have a feeling it will take a while for it to happen and that assume that it will actually get some money back from his work.

Paid some bills yesterday, the big one was for our property rate, it was $297 for the quarter. DH also filled up the car. It this point I pretty much can finalise our May spending, except we might need to buy milk and bread tomorrow. I'm kind of eager to finalise May now but there is actually still 3 days to go.

A lot has happened to us this month that I don’t even know where to start telling you about it. 3 weeks ago we had to go interstate for an emergency because of DH’s grandmother, she was critical in the hospital, luckily she is now recovering. Without hesitation we flew out few hours after hearing the news. We stayed with my in-laws for few days, our accommodation and most of our foods were covered. We still however, spent all up $770+ on airfares, car rental, taxis, and a bit on food. I’ve decided that this money will come out of our Emergency Fund. I will probably repay the EF at the end of the year. I just want to achieve all my financial goals this year first before I do anything else.

2 weeks ago we went to Fiji for our holiday this year... it was fantastic! We stayed for a week, and spent a bit too much. We went over our budget by over $600! Oops! I have decided to take this money from our Sunny day savings. Our Sunny Day saving is for anything that we really feel like spending it on. In the past I’ve mainly used it to buy some shares. This is where my $5 per NSD normally goes into and in the past I used to also put $200 a month into it but I have currently stopped this regular monthly deposit. Despite the overspending we really enjoyed our holiday and wished we stayed longer (I will try to post some photos on the weekend).

It feels like we haven’t been home at all this month. Financially, it is going to be a so-so month, there are some big bills due like our quarterly property rates/tax and a lot of medical bills for DH’s injury. Also, in the last few days DH and I haven’t been feeling too good. I think it is probably from too much travelling and the change in the weather, luckily we haven’t really spent any money for it and we are now recovering well.

Hopefully, I will be able to catch up on everyone’s blog in the next few days. I missed you all.

We just found out that DH will be getting a bonus from work sometime this month. It's not much, after super/retirement money and tax gets taken out we are hoping to get around $1,500 net. We will be using some of it as our spending money for our holiday. Oh yeah, we will be going overseas for our holiday this year. Both the airfare and accommodation has been paid for, we just need some spending money. We shouldn't need much, DH and I have been saving some of our spending money for it too. So far I've saved up about $100 and I think DH has been stashing away almost $200. I don't think we really need much, we will just be staying at the resort and our breakfast is already paid for.

The rest of the bonus money will go in the car fund. At this stage we will take $500 out of the bonus money as our spending money but anything left over will be put in my trading account maybe.

I've really got nothing else much to update about, our smart meter is now in action. So far the electricity has gone off twice.

We've had a bit of health issues in the last month or so, it has cost a lot of money, sent a bit going to the doctors, physio, acupuncture, and of course meds. So again we are over our budget this month.

Man, I didn't recognised my blog at all. It looks so different.

It's nice but I think it will take me a bit of time to get used to this new set up.

We are about to get our electric meter change to smart meter. I think we are one of the first area that will be getting it in our state.

They say that this will be more accurate and that we won't have a guy coming in to our property every three months.

I don't know how this will affect our electric bill. According to the power company we will get a more accurate reading and therefore it will be cheaper. Of course they would say that. But obviously, this change will cost money and I have no doubt that it will be us consumers that will have to pay for it in the end.

This is my wish list for this year.

Household:
1. Fridge
2. LED TV
3. Rug
4. Furnitures for the study - Desk, Chair & Filing Cabinet.

Personal:
1. IPod Touch
2. Kindle
Ohh, don't I wish...

Spent a lot of money again on the weekend. This is becoming a habit for us, buying too much stuff on weekends, and it has to stop. I will have to make a list of things that we bought this month, it's not pretty.

Apart from shopping too much on Saturday we also did a lot of gardening on Sunday. DH planted a lemon tree and I planted a tomato. DH also bought a blueberry bush, hopefully we can plant it sometime this week. We've never had berries before (except for strawberries), so this should be interesting. It was only $8, and DH really wanted to try it.

Nothing much else happened here, there are a lot of bills this month. Our quarterly property rate is due this week, and utilities are a lot more this month because of annual fees. I can't wait for this month to finish, October should be so much better than this month.

DH won a $30 Gift card last week from work, and it didn't cost him anything. They were celebrating some milestone at work and was just giving a lot of prizes. Many people got movie tickets, alcohol and gift cards.

The one he got was for Bunnings (a one stop shop Hardware Store). We spent it by buying new filters for our under the counter/sink water filter.

Interesting topic BA.

I guess it depends on how you define frugality, if it means always buying the cheaps item then that's not us; or if it means always watching our money then that's not us; or if it means always thinking only about the future then that is not us either. Mmmm...maybe we are not frugal at all.

This is what we normally do:

We don't always buy the cheapest thing in the market. No matter how cheap an item is, if it doesn't taste good or it doesn't work then it just become a waste, and that is just not frugal to us.

We are not a "brand name" snobs either. Sometimes this saying can be true: "Only the rich can buy cheap". For us it mostly about quality rather than quantity, don't really care about its brand name. Most of the time it can cost less in the long run. A RayBan sunglasses that DH bought back in 2000 for almost $200 is still in very good condition despite how many times he has dropped it and wears it practically everyday.

For us it's all about having a balance life style. Eventhough we put money away for our future we also have no qualms about spending our hard earn money today either. If it's within our budget then why not spend it, especially on something that we value, like date nights or holidays. Our relationship is more important to us than money.

So I think overall we are not uber-frugal but mindful about where our money goes.

I personally do love doing up the budget, I just love working with the numbers. I just love thinking about what we can do/buy with the money. It is not necessarily about things that we want to buy really. Most of the time I dream about which stocks I can buy for the money I save from spending less on groceries or from lowering utility bills. I just love buying shares

Got a phone call from our internet provider, they are calling again to get us to sign up for a 12-month contract with a 10% off. Last time they called I think they wanted 24 months, which DH said No to. This time DH agreed for the 12-month deal. They will also give us $10 credit per month for 6 months on our home phone, it is with the same provider. It is about $120 worth of saving for us.

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I've been enjoying reading everyone's $1K lists.

I think the only thing worth over 1K before I meet DH was my second hand car that was worth $2K. And I guess my education, which I haven't fully paid off yet anyway. DH and I spend a lot on our education almost every year on both formal and informal studies.

Apart from the House and Car which is really DH's purchases. Here's ours list, the ones that I can remember:

Wedding/Rings/Honeymoon ~$20K

Bed Set (Mattress, Bed frame, 2 bedside tables, and Tallboy) - $2.7K great sale price

Gift to Parent - $2K (2002)

Overseas Holiday - $3K

Laptop - $1.2K but it included wireless router and powerboard w/ surcharge and also got some tax refund for it, so this probably ended up to be less than $1K

Interstate Holiday - $1.3K

LPG Convertion for the Car - $2.4K but got 2K rebate back from the gov't and we have also saved so much more from reducing our fuel cost.

Gift to Parent - $4K (2008)

Dental Surgery ~$2K it included Hospital excess pay, but I did get some rebate so all up it would have been around that.

New Gutter - $2.9K

Roof Restoration - $1.3K

Gift to relative for hospital cost for major medical surgery - $3K (2008)

Electrical work - $1.9K (2009) There is more work that needs to be done here but hoping it won't be as much as this.

Repairs and renovation -$2.9K (so far this year). This incl plumbing work and materials, we did most of the labour ourselves.

*I call them "gift" because it is better to think of them that way, no resentment. I really don't believe in lending money to family and friends, it ruins relationships. We gave away quite a bit of money last year, but we were lucky too last year because we earnt so much more than expected. I've never talked about this before, not even here. I believe in helping out because we have been there before too and we were lucky to have someone help us out just for the seek of helping out without expecting anything back.

A lot of our big purchases is for house improvement and holidays. I'm amaze that a lot of our holidays didn't make the list. We do have our upcoming holiday that will most likely cost around $2.5K.

That's all I can think of for now, I don't think there's any left really.

We decided to start putting our monthly savings into our mortgage redraw again, starting this month. It is most likely that our interest rate will go up before the end of the year. So we want to put some extra money in it to keep within our current payments.

I've mentioned before how for a year now we been putting our monthly savings into the stock market. Lately, I haven't been able to find another stock to buy, not that I'm looking that hard though. I'm really waiting for the market to retrace a bit before getting in again. In the mean time there are few grand in the trading account waiting for the next buy. But we won't be putting any more money in it for the next few months, maybe not until next year again.

Sunday (which was yesterday here) was spent working around the house. DH and I got up late and had a very late breakfast. DH decided then to clean the gutter and resealed a couple of the joints where it has been leaking a bit. I on the other hand did some weeding in the herb garden and tidying up the front garden, raking leaves and pulling some more weeds. DH was also planning to do some spraying at the back but it's very windy around here at the moment so hoping he will get that done next weekend. I'm hoping we can get rid of the weeds in the next month coz I want to aerate the lawn soil and then spread more grass seeds before it gets too hot again.

The herbs are doing really well at the moment, I got some coriander (cilantro), flat parsley and rosemary. I just planted some basil last week, I don't know if they will survive, probably a bit early for them. The capsicums (bell peppers) are also doing well considering I haven't really been looking after it. There are about a dozen of them in just 2 small plants. I was going to pick 2 of them yesterday but the bee buzzing around kept me out.

All up we spent almost 3 hours outside working, it was nice weather except for the wind. Afterwards we had our afternoon tea in front of the tv watching Australian football. It was just a very nice Sunday at home and it was a NSD.

It was a very tiring day, DH and I spent the whole day shopping. Spending (and making) money can be tiring. Got some really nice bargain today though. We bought:
An engagement gift for next week for $29 (down from $70)
Slazenger sunglasses for DH, good for when he plays tennis or go running - only $15 down from $100, 85% off!
I also got 2 sunglasses, I only really was planning to get 1 but it was such a good price that I decided to get 2 coz I couldn't decided which one to get and plus it was within my budget. I budgeted $200 for a new sunglasses. I ended up paying just over $203 for a Gucci and an Oroton brand. I'm normally not that into brand names but these were good and most importantly actually fit my face. Besides the only other ones that I liked and fitted my face was already around $170-$199. Also the Oroton one is prescriptibles, it will be nice to wear sunglasses without having to have contact lenses on, which I hate wearing.
We also stopped by at Aldi, the tomatoes and mushrooms were really cheap today. Only spent $21.22 on groceries today. We should have enough food for the rest of the month.

Well that was our Saturday, now I'm beat and all I want now is to eat dinner and watch tv all night.

Costco just opened its first ever store here in Australia yesterday. Its first store is in Melbourne so it is not that far from where we are. Apparently there were some people that drove for hours just to go to Costco. I'm not sure if I want to pay $60 (Aust dollar) just to have a look. I don't think we buy enough to make it worthy of becoming a member. I think I will wait and see what it is like in few months time. I still think this is good for increasing competion around here. We need it.

We had a big weekend spent way too much at Nobu, but it was so good. We really didn't do much because the weather was horrible, raining and really windy.

Not much to update these days. We've been pretty good with NSDs so far this month.

We will be going out to Nubo Japanese restaurant this weekend for some celebration so that will be quite pricey.

The Aust market is still going up like crazy, I've closed out my short trade. Loss some from it but the up side of my individual shares more than covered by almost 3 times. The portfolio just hit 40% profit today, I really doubt that this will stay up this high though.

Nothing much happening here. Just paid off our accommodation for our next vacation.

We haven't been grocery shopping for over 2 weeks, apart from getting milk, bread and that, I just been using up whatever we got in the pantry and freezer. But I think we really need to go this weekend. I might make a menu plan and shopping list later today.

Just heard from the news that our employment numbers are a lot better than expected. Our economy is looking a lot better that before and this could mean an increase to our interest rate by the end of the year. We have definitely avoided the recession here in Australia.

We needed it. This weekend day trip will be pricey. But we really need to get away and try to enjoy ourselves. DH has been working so hard lately and really need to enjoy life a bit.

We spent a bit of money this weekend. We bought some clothes and eat out a lot. The eating out was bad, we really didn't need to do that much eating out... regrets, regrets.

Early Saturday morning I got woken up by the beeping of our security alarm. It needed a new battery, that cost us $40. While out getting the new battery we also got some noodles for dinner. We didn't feel like cooking at all this weekend. The only thing I cooked this weekend was the carrot cake. It was such a naughty weekend. I'm sure having regrets right now. Oh well live and learn.

The only good news was I managed to only spend $32 on grocery this week.

We've had 3 NSD in the row, I didn't even realised it until today. Today should be a spend day though. I asked DH to get some stuff for me today and I'm pretty sure he will need to fill up the car again today. Tomorrow we will need to go to the market to get some meat and fresh produce. I also want to go shopping for some stuff for our get away.

It is almost the end of July and it is time to start thinking about Christmas. Yes...that's right! I said Christmas. It is only just around the corner, so I am starting to think about it now. Luckily we have the funds set a side for it and all have to do now is make a list of what to get people and what to make. And also whether we will be spending it at home or somewhere else.