October Budget Review & November Budget Preview

October was a crazy month for me.  Not only was it a three pay cheque month for me, but I was pretty much away for work the entire month for work, so I worked a ton of overtime.  It definitely inflated our income for November’s budget and has helped to complete a few of my financial goals.

I was extremely proud of how low our spending was in September, and while October seems to have been a bit more expensive according to the YNAB numbers, it includes some work expenses that will be reimbursed once I submit my receipts, and we are still miles below the summer months.  I’m very happy about that… but I have to take it with a grain of salt… I was away for work almost the entire month, so I didn’t really have any opportunity to spend… and our food budget is really only for one person (my husband) for most of the month… so we’ll have to see how things work once I’m home again… whenever that is…

The largest two categories are the same as usual… the mortgage and food & drink.  And the third largest category for spending this month was “planned spending” because of some travel expenses for my husband’s trip to Vegas.  The next one is the category that covers lots of items sort of health and family related… We had a few extra expenses in that category this month… Other than that… not much exciting to discuss… but because I like to go in to detail on everything, let’s visit the numbers:

1. Mortgage:  The always boring category… Maybe when we get our spending and saving under control I will start budgeting extra on the mortgage to do some extra payments on it… but that’s a long way off at this point…

2. Utilities & Home Insurance: Zero spending in this category in October… just keep filling up the funds for when the bills come in the cold months…

3. RRSP & TFSA: No changes this month.  We are just plugging along at the new higher values… Though we should really put some money away in our TFSAs… That’s still on my list of financial goals…

4. Planned Spending / Saving: In October my husband went to Vegas, so we had some expenses for travel.  And now we are working on new travel plans for January, so I want to increase what we have saved in our travel funds.  I’ve put quite a bit in to the planned spending funds for November, including meeting my goal of my husband’s education fund at $7500 by the end start of October November.

5. Life Insurance, Medical & Family Expenses:  As I mentioned already, we had a few extra and unexpected expenses in this category this month.  Enough to wipe out some of the “rainy day funds” in this category and then some, so for November it is a bit of a rebuild month… Hopefully we don’t have any surprises here this month, since we won’t have the rainy day funds…

6. Cable, Cell Phones & Internet:  We switched up our internet and television provider in October to save money.  And with the deal that we got, we are actually going to be getting money back from our old provider, and then we were given some credits on our new account, so no expenses in this category for October.  For November, I didn’t need to add much, since we already have some buffer funds in there.

7. Car Insurance, Maintenance & Gas:  I had a flat tire on my car, and my husband had some maintenance done on his car… I might have mentioned it before, but I’m trying to save up some car money to fix the dent in my husband’s car, so I’m dumping a bunch of my extra income in to that for November.  I don’t know what it will cost, but I’ll get an estimate pretty soon here and we can find out for sure…

8. Groceries, Eating Out & Liquor:  Surprisingly expensive in October.  I know we bought some extra food for Thanksgiving, and we can’t forget all the Halloween candy… but still… I would really like to get this down, but until I can convince myself to make sacrifices and focus on it, and also get my husband on board even when I’m away… it won’t happen… so I’ll just put another big chunk of the budget in to this category for November, and continue along the same path…

9. Household Goods & Toiletries: We are doing some work in our backyard, so we spent some money on supplies for that in October.  Though perhaps some of that could be in the home reno money… Oh well, it’s in here because it is relatively small things… So I put a bit more in this fund in November to finish up that work, and maybe start some more.  I should write up a post about our plans for our backyard…

10. Fitness & Sports: I didn’t budget anything for October for this category, and we didn’t spend anything in this category in October either.  My husband is considering playing more hockey, so I’ve budgeted a bit more for November so we can pay for that if he goes ahead with it… and I still have some fees to pay for my own sports teams… I just haven’t been around to pay them yet.

11. Clothing & Personal Care: I keep telling myself that I’m going to buy myself some new work clothes, but obviously I don’t need any since I still haven’t done it… When I get some time at home, I will probably have a hair appointment, so I have added some money for that… My husband went and bought some new jeans already in November, so perhaps it’s good that I haven’t bought any clothes for myself recently.

12. Misc.: This is the catch all category… our regular charitable donations and some gifts and some parking fees.  For November, I’m starting to fund our gift category for the coming of Christmas.  I don’t want to spend a lot of money on gifts and stuff, but I hope to make a bunch of food gifts, so those will come from this fund and not the regular groceries fund.  I also know that around the holidays there are a lot more charities looking for donations and friends doing special fundraising events, so I have budgeted more in that category to prepare for that.

This month I have another category to discuss briefly, and this one is a bit of a frustration to me because it doesn’t fit nicely… My business expenses.  I paid for a few things right at the end of October, so I won’t get my reimbursement until sometime in November… and since I don’t budget for these things, it comes thru in YNAB as “overspending” in October.  When the expenses and the reimbursement happen in the same month it works out fine… But this time it just didn’t time nicely… Does anyone have any suggestions?

**Edit:  I have decided that I don’t want to share my actual numbers on the blog, so I have removed them from this post… Sorry if it makes it a bit confusing or unreadable… Hopefully it isn’t unbearably so.

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