Feb

5

expenses when visiting family

Filed Under budget | 3 Comments

roscrea castle

This weekend I’m travelling to Ireland to visit family. I’ll be taking my own packing advice, and not taking too much. Strictly carry-on only here.

Whilst I might have packing down to a fine art, I’m exceedingly good at spending money whilst travelling. I nearly always *need* a drink at the airport (a bottle of pop or something), plus I often quite fancy something to eat, even if I’m not hungry, and I’m likely to be tempted by a magazine or two. Added to that, I’ll be using Euros, and foreign money is never quite the same - everything seems to end up more expensive.

Normally, if I’m going on holiday, this isn’t a problem as it’s all budgeted for. This trip is pretty impromptu though, and it’s coming out of my regular spending money. Since the elder statesmen of the family always quarrel over who gets to pay the bill in restaurants I’m pretty certain that I won’t need to spend a lot on food. We’ll probably go to the pub, where I’ll need to buy a couple of rounds, and make sure my younger brother has all the soft drinks he needs. Then there’s all the sundries. And the money for the collection at Mass on Sunday.

I must come up with a budget for this. If I have an idea how much it’s likely to cost in Euros, it’ll be so much easier.

Image by superminx

Jan

15

budgeting tip: make it automagical

Filed Under budget | 20 Comments

magic spill in aisle nineMaking it automagical has got to be my favourite personal finance tip of all time. Prior to my conversion, I was often late with bills, not because I didn’t have the money, but because I’m a born procrastinator. Why do today, what you can put off until tomorrow? They’ll charge you for it, that’s why.

In my new system, every thing that I possibly can gets put onto direct debit or standing order (automatic bill pay, and automatic money transfer). All my bills, all my savings, all my investments, all my donations, and now all my spending monies.

It’s been a personal finance revolution. I rarely have to write cheques. I haven’t missed a bill in months. I have no need to worry about my cashflow situation, I’ve set it all up so that everything gets moved or paid as soon as possible after pay day.

What about you? Do you like to make it automagical? Or do you prefer to pay your bills individually each month? Let me know in the comments.

Image by kevindooley

Jan

7

spending plans for 2008

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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:

spending 2008

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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