budget
spending plans for 2008
WSA adsense code -->Since I let you in on how much I’m worth (alive - like many people I’m worth more dead) and how I spent my money last year, you might also be interested to see how I’m planning to spend it in 2008.
I’ll hand you over to my beautiful chart:
Just to let you know what’s in all the categories:
- Income Tax and NI - funnily enough, this is income tax and national insurance, I want to pay these to avoid jail time
- Mortgage - this is just the mortgage repayment, I’m on a 2 year fixed rate deal that ends in June 2009, so this won’t change
- Fun Money - this includes clothes, groceries, holidays, gifts, travel, pocket money, eating out and drinking; essentially all my discretionary expenditure
- Bills - gas, electricity, mobile phone, landline, internet, council tax, disability insurance; basically all the bills that are paid monthly
- Investments - pension and ISA contributions
- Irregular Expenses - house maintenance, tv licence, house insurance; bills paid less frequently that monthly
- Student Loan - my non-mortgage debt deducted via tax withholding, and with an interest rate tied to inflation, this is being paid off as slowly as possible
- Savings - there’s no particular purpose to this money, it’s as much as I can be certain of being able to squeeze out of my pay easily
- Charity - an inadequate sum to be sure, this is the money that is budgeted and paid by direct debt to my chosen charities, I’ll almost certainly donate to charities from my fun money if it seems appropriate
More canny people may have realised that my target is to invest 16% of my income in 2008, not 13%. To do this I need to grow my income, which I’ll do via blogging, payrises, maybe selling some excess vacation days and anything else that comes up.
What do you think?
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Tags: Discussion
8 comments for “spending plans for 2008”
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© 2008 plonkee money. 
Raising your percentage is the real goal for me. If we can all learn to live at where we are and save any raise or extra monies, we will get to our goal faster!
Crikey Plonkee, I wish I could be so organised when it comes to planning my spending - I find it hard to plan for the next week, let alone the next year!
To be honest, I can’t be trusted to pay bills on time, so everything is an automatic payment. Including savings, spending money, charities,… It’s not that hard to add up all the numbers and then tweak. Of course it helps that I’m a spreadsheet geek
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Wow its great that your investments are are more than your bills! Good work!
Plonkee, you need a couple of kids to make things a little more interesting.
I can show you a similar graph. . . but it won’t look anywhere near at the end of 2008 with three kids. . .
nice graph once again
I must say, considering how much we hear about high taxes in Great Britain, your tax and NI seems surprisingly reasonable.
Well, just for quick information current income tax bands in the UK work out to be:
From things I’ve picked up, I’d guess that low to mid income earners are taxed lower in the UK, and high earners are taxed more in the US.
National Insurance is the equivalent of Social Security (and the two are transferable to a certain extent). National Insurance bands are: