Happy New Year!

Apologies for not updating in a good while, life just got in the way – work deliverables ramping up, easing of lockdown in Victoria and of course Christmas festivities!

Table 1: October to December 2020 Combined Expenditure

In generally, I appear to be running under budget for most of the categories, though I expect Food & Drinks to creep up over the summer season – something we will have to monitor closely. One of the biggest savings is for groceries, mainly due to minimal purchases resulting from living at home with the parents (haha).

Transport costs were a little above expected as a result of two things:

• Car servicing (~$300)
• Purchasing a brand new set of 4 tyres (~$500)

I expect this number to converge to the budget over the course of a full year. 

I am not sure why household utilities were that high, but this is likely to be a cashflow issue. I will continue to monitor this trend over the coming months.

As such, my savings rate wasn’t as strong compared to Q1 of FY21, but this is somewhat expected given the circumstances. If anything, I am a little surprised that the savings rate has consistently been above 15%, which was my target for the previous financial year. I guess this goes to show that there is opportunities to increase the savings rate in light of the Covid situation.

Table 2: October to December Savings Rate

So, we wrap up the first half of the financial year with a savings rate just above 40% – a strong start, and hopefully something we can maintain for the second half.

Table 3: FY21 Savings rate (as at 31 December 2020)

Cheers

APF