I am way above budget. The month has pooped on me and I’m scrambling to clear the mess. Sorry for the distasteful analogy—it’s late and I haven’t the brainpower to find another.
Anyway, this is where we are.
£397 (27%) over budget.
I won’t go into too much detail here (I’ll put together an exception report) but suffice it to say sometimes, unexpected expenses come out of the woodwork and you just have to roll with the punches and cough up for it. To be fair I could’ve been a little bit more conservative in my spending notwithstanding but a lesson to be learned no doubt.
There were two main things that pushed me over budget
- I paid an £80 call out charge for an engineer to tell me that my microwave was unfixable. As a result a bought a replacement for £310. Altogether, £390.
- I had to look after a sick relative including buying some essentials for them, which set me back £120 plus £60 to go visit them; totalling £180.
Those two unexpected expenses total £570. As mentioned above, there could have been cheaper solutions that would have lowered my spending but I’ll take it on the chin and make a note to consider alternative options more closely in future before whipping out the wallet to solve my problems at any cost.
That’s what good financial management really comes down to doesn’t it? You always have options. My first option is normally the most expensive one: just throw a bunch of money at it and move on, but I need to learn to think up more cost effective solutions and give them a chance to save me money. They may be more time consuming and less appealing, but in the end I can’t keep throwing money at everything.
Here’s the comparison of where we were at this point last month:
Comments are closed.