August Finance Check: Money Windfall Means Extra Spending

Time for my August finance check! Doing these posts have really helped me understand what’s been going wrong with my budget month after month and consider how I can address that in order to fix it. For example I often forget to include expenses that I really should have thought of!

How did the July budget go

So August finance check, how well did I manage my budget in July?

I had prepared for a stricter month in July, or at least to try to adhere to a stricter budget because of lower expected income. But then it was time for tax refunds and end if year Working for Families Tax Credit square up.

Somehow I ended up owing about $650 in income tax. I was shocked and I will need to try and understand how this happened considering the estimate I calculated in April was about $200 of refund.

Luckily I was owed about $3,300 in Working for Families Tax Credits which easily covered the tax I needed to pay, leaving me with nearly $2,700 extra in hand.

I wanted to take good care to not waste this extra money, so I immediately put $1,000 to the savings account for our Finland trip and transferred the rest to another savings account to wait for me to decide what to do with it and earn some interest.

I won’t lie, I have spent a bit unnecessarily because of it, kind of treating myself to a few things I usually can’t afford.

At the time of writing I still have $1,000 left and that will be ear marked for some new clothes suitable for networking and the citizenship application (nope, I still haven’t done that!). Whatever is left I’ll keep in savings, possibly for my planned trip to do the Tongariro Crossing next summer.

Anyway.

If I don’t count the extra discretionary spending because of the tax credit, my budget did alright!

I came under or right on in most of my regular budget categories, except cafe spending of course. That got out of hand having some extra money at my disposal ($196.50 spent instead of budgeted $80).

I had again budgeted $421 for the citizenship application but only spent $25 on a new digital passport photo which needs to be included in the application. I also re-checked the cost and it has gone up to $470, which is in the next month’s budget now.

Due to the way I budget (weekly, rather than strictly based on a month), the July internet bill didn’t fall into this budgeting period, therefore it was $0. (Which means next month will be double.)

My other spending and shopping were pretty big this month, $519.05 in other spending and $377.50 in shopping.

The other spending breakdown is $17.97 for a birthday gift for my daughter’s friend, $24.78 at the pharmacy for nasty bug bite treatment, $129.50 on a uni course book, $100 on my credit card payments, $127 on my training plan, $19.30 on lunch and treats from the dairy, $19.50 on GP fees, $45 on a haircut, $23 on a networking event, $4 on exchange fees to send money to Finland and $9 on postage fees for selling an old uni book.

Shopping on the other hand was $125.45 at Paperplus (a book for me, a book for my partner, tracing book for my daughter, little toys for both kids), $93.56 for joining a challenge to learn about growing this blog, $13.49 on printing a new budget planner from the Warehouse Stationery, $105 on my favourite peppermint brownies and $40 on another book.

All in all I spent $2,713.08 in July, which is only a bit under $80 over budget. But, I didn’t sort out my citizenship, so if you take away that, I did spend a bit of money!

Finance check: Savings progress

Thanks to the tax credits, my savings were high this month and I saved $1,520. In this is also a new $250 parcel (read about what it is here).

Emergency fund

Out of the total saved I put $15 towards my emergency fund.

There is $206.51 in there now, with $0.61 earned in interest.

Honestly, this doesn’t make sense because the total has gone up by more than $15 so I must have lost track somewhere, added more than I have written down or saved the money instead of investing it.

I need to keep a better track of it!

Sleep out

This month I put $25 into our sleep out account. We haven’t touched it for a while, which is really nice!

It is very slowly growing, as still, it is not a big priority.

Somewhat exciting thing is though that we have now demolished our old firewood shed which was in the spot where the sleep out will be going!

The reason for doing that was us scoring 8 cubes of firewood for $150! We didn’t want to put all that into the old shed knowing we’d most likely need to move it, so my partner just demolished the old shed and used all the material from that to build a new on the other side of our property.

So a little bit of progress, without having to actually spend any money.

The current total in our sleep out savings account is $5,480. We also earned $10 in interest.

Trip to Finland

The vast majority of the savings, surprise surprise, went towards our trip to Finland. This was $1,480.

My savings have been in a 60 day notice account for the higher interest rate and I have now made the request to withdraw all the funds.

They will be released early October and I will start looking at flight tickets then!

I have also diverted the interest to be paid to another account and my regular savings to the same account so none of it gets locked for 60 days again.

Thankfully I’m not losing much on interest, as today the notice saver has 5.4% where as the new account I’m diverting all this to is 5.25%.

There’s currently $7,568 in the account and it earned $28 in interest in July.

I’m getting so excited and feel like I’m really going to accomplish my target of $10,000!

Other

The rest of the tax credits that haven’t been used I put into my other savings account to earn some interest and to wait for it to be used. Which why I didn’t count it as savings.

Finance check: Investing

I invested $250 in July.

This was my usual $10/month investment and I reached $210 on the account where I have been putting money aside for a bigger investment parcel and invested that as well.

I received about $16 in dividends in July as well.

I’m currently studying portfolio construction through my degree and I really need to get onto actually properly sorting out my own portfolio!

But so far I haven’t done it yet.

Finance check: Debt

In July I paid $100 towards my interest free debt with Purple Visa bringing the balance down to $3,093.

I used it to buy myself an Apple Watch and upgraded my laptop.

Looking forward

In August I really need to sort out my citizenship! I was putting it off a bit because I needed a personal referee and the person I chose was very busy, so I didn’t want to add to her plate! But I will bring it up again with her.

So the citizenship application is going to be $470.

My youngest daughter also has her birthday soon and I have 4 other birthdays that I need to buy presents for.

I also need to spend some money for new clothes to feel a bit more like I belong at the networking event I will be attending soon.

There’s couple of appointments in August too, like my osteopath and my oldest daughter’s first hair cut!

To be honest, these few things I have specifically mentioned I fully would have forgotten to include, had I not used the new budget cheat sheet I made!

It is a list of over 100 budget categories and the idea is to help trigger your memory as you are writing your budget to make sure you won’t forget to include anything!

You can get yours for FREE by subscribing to my newsletter below!

I’m really stoked how well it reminded me of expenses I needed to budget for, but would have otherwise forgotten.

That’s I’m fairly positive it will help you too!

Anyway, I have an expensive month coming up and some of the extra spending will be covered by the tax credits I have put aside, so most likely will be a deficit month (meaning that I will go over my budget).

But such is life!

Have you done a finance check this August?