May felt like a very spendy month to us.
Can you see us?
This is our first post where we don’t reveal our specific items of spending, but instead focus on our overall savings rate. Read about why we made that decision here.
However, we still want to talk about the things that influenced our spending, in a quest for us all to save even more on this journey to early retirement.
We actually had a pretty exciting month of free events. We’ll have a post coming out soon how frugality does not equal boredom, in fact in can mean lots of fun for a fraction of the cost.
Through a friend of his, Poopsie managed to get us free tickets to Movie World and Sea World! I was pretty excited as, only a few weeks before, I’d told Poopsie I wouldn’t mind us going to Movie World this year before we moved away. When the free ticket opportunity came up, we jumped at the chance.
Thank goodness we got free tickets. Had we paid entry, we’d be pretty annoyed. It definitely was not as fun as I remembered. Poopsie and I also both discovered we are quite the scaredy-cats. Movie World has a lot of scary rides and a lot of little kid rides, but it only has a few rides in between. I remember going as a kid and there being a wide variety of shows on but now, they just have one show which was pretty disappointing.
Sea World on the other hand was fantastic. Again, neither of us had been since we were kids but we both had an awesome day out. Seeing the beautiful marine animals and learning about the conservation and research efforts of Sea World was great. I would definitely have been happy to pay for entry there and I can’t wait to one day take my nephews and see them be amazed by the sharks, turtles and, of course, the penguins.
It was Mother’s Day this month, we hope you got to enjoy some time with your mum! My mum was travelling overseas, but we did get to take Poopsie’s mum out to brunch at a lovely French bistro. It was delicious and we intend to go back, that’s how much we loved it. It was quite reasonably priced in our opinion, but brunch for four people does add up which certainly influenced our eating out category this month.
We also got a new vacuum cleaner. Our dust-buster type vacuum cleaner broke and we wanted to replace it as we found it so convenient. We found a Dyson stick vacuum on sale for $299. We sold our large Dyson on Gumtree for $250, so we are pretty happy with our ~$49 vacuum! Poopsie is the chief vacuumer of the family and has been zipping around with it happily.
In March, April and May, our groceries have been over $500 for the month. We usually try and aim for $400 a month, so this is quite an increase. Now that it has happened three months in a row, it may be our new norm. We can’t figure out why the jump, as we haven’t changed our eating habits at all. We prioritise fresh produce and whole foods in our diet, which invariably do cost more than processed foods. We are more than happy to pay this money toward our health.
We did go camping this month, but we paid our site fees earlier in the year when we booked it. Unfortunately, we ended up coming home early due to the rain, but we had a good time while we were there.
Finally, both our car registration, car insurance and our council rates were due.
So without further ado, here is our May 2017 savings rate:
Do you track your savings rate? How did you go in May?
That’s a pretty impressive month given the huge expenses of rego, insurance and council rates. Sea World sounds like a great day out.
It was a great day. I highly recommend it if you’re ever up in SE QLD.
I track my savings rate, but do so over a year rather than a month as it smooths out lumpy spending like you mention above that distorts the big picture. eg. This month, my savings rate was -46% (yes negative!) but that’s because my wife and I re-landscaped a garden bed and went on a holiday to Singapore and bought a new camera while there. All of this was planned and to budget, with our annual savings rate tracking nicely towards 7%, but it does illustrate the distortion issue that can occur when using monthly snapshots.
Hi Ozstache! Thanks for tuning in. Yes, I agree with what you’re saying. There can definitely be anomalies month to month. We find it handy to track monthly so that we know if we are on track. It’s a good way to help us keep our spending in check. However, I also track our average yearly savings rate- that’s the one we want to be as high as possible!
I know what you mean about being a scaredy cat – this definitely something that is changing as I get older. Sometimes I’ll fight it, but mostly I look at people’s faces while they are on the ride and its “nuh-huh!” from me.
Of course, the penguins
I’m curious – why did you sell your Dyson? We absolutely love ours, and if it ever does cark it, I’d probably be straight out to buy a new one (but I’d rather not have to, don’t die, vacuum, don’t die!)
That savings rate is phenomenal considering the large bills you had all falling due at once.
We just no longer used our big Dyson. We much preferred to zip around with the handheld (and when I say we… I mean Poopsie, I very rarely vacuum). We debated keeping it, but we generally live in fairly small places and the handheld is plenty. Nothing against our bigger Dyson, we did really like it. We could just never be bothered getting it out. We live in a two story place and we kept it downstairs, so that may have had something to do with it.
I actually haven’t been on a grown-up rollercoaster. I don’t like rides at all. Haha!
Congrats on the savings rate!
Thanks. I haven’t been on a proper adults one either… and I am quite happy never to do so!
Nice job on saving over 50% of your income, even with all those expenses 🙂 Looks like you guys had a great time at the worlds, we’re yet to go there..I’m sure we’d love to take our child there one day 🙂
Mr DDU
Definitely. I can’t wait to take my nephews to Sea World and watch their amazement at seeing the animals!