Bad news folks, just when we thought we were seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, we got slapped back down – another 6 weeks of Stage 4 restrictions. Whilst this is certainly great for my wallet, it is starting to get quite stale. I really need to find some other things to do!

Nevertheless, July is beginning of a new financial year, and so it is important to start the year strongly.

The table below summarises my expenditure for July.

Table 1: July 2020 Expenditure

• Being stuck at home, there was minimal spend on Groceries (thanks mum and dad) and eating out was non-existent. We ordered take away once or twice but luckily Dad footed the bill on that.
• I would say my largest expenditure under Transport was on an indoor bike trainer (~$670) which is a one-off cost. This enabled me to use Zwift, a virtual cycling app which enables me to cycle around London whilst in lockdown!
• For Household Utilities, the quarterly water bill came in which included an annual Parks levy. No real surprises here. 
• The $376.80 under Holiday & Travel was an accomodation down payment towards a future event… hopefully the COVID-19 situation clears up before that time comes!

So although I underspent in majority of categories, it ended up only being about 4% under my budget. In a typical month (pre-covid) I would have probably exceeded my budget after including the one-off purchases. 

So as we can see below, a very strong start for July – or so it seems. This rate is certainly overstated given that three cycles of my salary were squeezed into a calendar month (I get paid every two weeks) and so we would expect the ‘actual’ rate to be around 30%. Oh well, let’s see if evens out next month.

Table 2: Summary of Savings Rate for FY21

I am in the process of writing some new articles, hopefully they are ready for this medium soon.

Cheers,

AussiePersonalFinance