Weekly Review: 26-30 May

I wish I could make more updates on this blog but I'm living a new life and it doesn't give much spare time. If it did, I'd rather use the time for catching up on rest.

Snowballing my allowance
I'm still good at snowballing my daily $10 allowance towards debt and I do so everyday! It's usually the only transaction my checking account makes on a daily basis.

Bigger car
Our dear Sirion has to go because the baby capsule can barely fit in it. In a few months, we'll switch to a car seat that's even bigger! We're not in a hurry but this is definitely going to be one of our big goals this winter. It might even prove challenging due to the economy at the moment and rising petrol prices.

Grocery
I participated at Give Me Back My Five Bucks's May Grocery Challenge but I still didn't meet my target. I thought I almost did, until today. I was a bit surprised when I saw that we overdrafted because I really thought I had everything under control. We even forgot to get dog food as planned, so we'll have to overdraft further tomorrow. Unless we want our dog to starve until pay day... just kidding! I find it a challenge to set a limit to grocery shopping because I'm not so good about being frugal about food for my family. I'm trying though. I know there is something there that needs some bettering.

Pet care
I gave our dog a bath this week. No hair cuts though, but still saved us money!

The digits
Sense to Dollars asked me if I could possibly post digits of my family's spending. Well, of course! I'm just not doing it because I'm not sure if that's interesting to people, but since there's one who'd want to know... here goes.

Unless otherwise stated, these are paid out fortnightly.

• Rent - $800
• Electricity - $160/mo (usually lower, $100 or less, in the summer)
• Satellite TV - $67.48/mo
• Phone + internet - $104.90/mo
• Savings - $500 (at least, so this varies fortnightly)
• Daycare - $424 (as of 23 June)
  
• Car loan payments - $108.47 (but we add a few more dollars to it)
• Home/car insurance - $39.72
• Health insurance - $36
• Bus tickets - $40 (once J's back to work this is gone)
• Debt payments - $350 (minimum)
• J's student loan payments - ~$295 (this varies depending on USD:NZD exchange)
• J's retirement - $97
• My retirement - $102
• J's allowance - $100
• My allowance - $100
• Petrol - $50 (if J is back to work that is)
• Hire purchases payments - $265 (this will be gone in 3 months time! Yee!)
• Mobile phone top-ups - $20 (but this is mostly once a month because I've not been a heavy mobile phone user since moving to NZ)
• Pet food - $20-$30/mo (depends on how much our dog eats)

That's pretty much the list of our regular cash flows. As you can see there is nothing there for dining out or takeaways or entertainment. We are not really the going out types anymore. That's why I'm hard on myself when we are not saving enough because we don't have the so-called latte factors. But then again, there's debt. Blah.

I'm still quite pleased that our net worth went up this month! :)