I had an appalling month last month. Contrary to what I initially thought though, it wasn’t the worst month of year so far—that unwanted prize goes to the month of July.
As you can see my goal is to get my income line (green) as high as possible, and my expenditure line (red) as low as possible. The delta is my savings. On this basis, you can see that June has been my most successful month by far—mainly owning to it being a 5-week month—but July was my worst.
August wasn’t great either. A total saving of £626.53 (15% of income) is way off what I want to be achieving (and thought I was achieving).
What this chart says to me is that I have a lot of work to do in order to bring my expenses down to an acceptable level. Based on my recent policy of saving half of all income, this performance over the last 5 months could be classed a complete disaster. For August example, 3,651 in expenses is about 1,500 over what I should have spent last month. That just cannot continue if I want to meet my goal of saving a healthy deposit within the next 8-12 months.
Forecast September 2021
I have to do better in September. I have to improve upon £3,651.23 in expenses. My goal is to bring that right down this month. I do not want at the end of the month to be in this position again. I need to start saving 50% of my income. This means that as a forecast, I will need to spend less than £2,250 in September if I am to save 50% of my income.
Spend less than £2,250 in September
September Performance Goal
Although it’s a 5-week month, I anticipate taking some days off and have baked that into the calculation.
So this is what I forecast for September:
£2,250 is a reduction of around £1,400 from August so I will need to be very deliberate about my budgeting and monitor all my spending carefully this month if I am to meet that goal. It’s not going to be easy to slash that amount off my spending. But it all starts with working with my budget carefully, being thoughtful, patient and having the discipline to say no not yet.
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