With April now done and dusted it’s time to see if I managed to keep to my plan to reduce my monthly spending and increase how much I save. I have turned April’s spending into the same pie chart as February and March’s spending with the same groups of outgoings. If you compare this chart to the previous months you can see that it’s quite different — housekeeping is (slightly unexpectedly) noticeably larger, as it travel. Purchases around half that of the previous two months, while food is higher than either of the previous months. Overall spending was roughly the same as the previous months so it makes a good comparison.
I can explain some of this. While most of the housekeeping costs are roughly the same each month, in February and March there is no council tax bill to pay. With the next tax year starting in April, the monthly council tax charges start again, and this adds one line item and a noticeable amount of money to the housekeeping slice. The increased internet chunk was affected by changing exchange rates — while the £/$ rate was up slightly, the £/€ rate increased significantly — as well as including a couple of domain name renewals which came up in April. Purchases in February and March were affected by a couple if big buys which were absent from April so even though this figure includes a payment to my credit card, it’s still down on previous months.
I had hoped to make savings on the entertainment budget, and that slice has gone down, but there is clearly more which could be done. May will be an interesting month as I will be traveling around a lot. I expect the chart for this month will be noticeably different.
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