October financial report

Welcome to October’s report. Where have the last 10 months gone? I can’t believe there’s only 2 months left of this decade….and only 6 more Fridays until Christmas. I’ll just let that sink in for a minute…

For those of you who are new– welcome, I do these reports each month as a way for me to track all of my financials and see how I’m progressing. Inadvertently they also hold me to account to all of you. Each report contains the following sections and you can skip to any of them by clicking the links below.

Spending | Savings & Investments | Credit Score | Superannuation | Side Hustling

For last months report see here.

Spending

Below is the breakdown of my spending by category as well as the relative % of my total spend for the month.

Notes:

Health & Medical: I had a medical procedure this month that costed $330 and then this total includes the cost of health insurance as well.
Gifts: My grandmothers birthday and my brothers birthday.
Personal care: A simple trim of my hair. I tend to avoid beauty expenses if I can.
Utilities: This month included Phone, Internet and a Gas bill.

I spent $5,641 in October 2018 in comparison to this month, meaning I spent $2,592.57 less than this time last year. Overall so far for 2019 I have spent $29,886. The same time last year I had spent $38,380 so I am $8,944 ahead for the year so far. I think that’s a great effort! That figure is based on actual monthly spend and doesn’t include any money put towards savings or sinking funds.

Below is the total spend per month for 2019 so far compared to 2018. (again excluding savings and sinking funds).

Savings & Investments

Savings

During October I saved $1,000 or 23% of my total income towards savings. At the end of October my savings accounts totaled $29,828. I wasn’t able to save as much as I wanted to due to my medical procedure and the fact that I had to pay for 3 lots of rent instead of the usual 2, as a rent payment was coming out the day before my next pay.

Even though I didn’t save much, so far in 2019 I have saved $20,687. This is more than the whole of 2018’s debt payoff and savings (which was $13,209). I’m feeling pretty proud to hit $20,000 saved, my goal for the year was $25,000 but with only 2 pays left (I’m paid monthly), I know I won’t be able to reach that. Either way, I’m still pretty proud.

Investments

The share market took a bit of a hit in July-August but is slowly coming back up. I haven’t contributed to my investments for a few months as I’ve mostly been putting money into my savings fund. In October I saw a decrease of $32 or 0.19% and my portfolio totaled $16,954 at the end of October.

Credit Score

I check my score every month on three major websites: Get Credit Score, Finder and Credit Savvy. My score isn’t really changing at all month to month now, which makes sense because I’m not taking on any new debt. My score sits at 741 on two of the sites and 720 on the other. The difference is because they use different credit reporting organisations, two being Equifax and the other is Experian.

Superannuation

My balance as of 15/10/19 was $57,146. I thought I’d see how much of an increase there was in one year and it was 22% or $10,156. In that time $7,089 was contributions from my work and myself. The rest was investment returns.