With all the focus by ASIC on household expenses ?

< 2000 a mth is very frugal for a family. Is that in Australia?

 

Well under 2k, however I live alone.

 

Bugger. I was trying to estimate in my head and messed it up. Mine is under 2k per month as well. I recently did mine for a household of 2 adults. It's around 23k for the year.

 

Ah, yes. That's actually my household category but my pre-coffee brain messed up the calcs.

 

Doesn't feel frugal. We are happy and comfortable.

 

Is one person a family?

 

But do you guys look like this?

 

Turns out I am in that category too but thought I wasn't because I failed mental arithmetic.

 

It's about $3k for us, a family of 3.
But 1/3 of that is daycare..

Today I splurged and spent $75 on myself.

 

You guys under 2k adding utilities, internet, health insurance, mobiles, groceries, holidays, shopping, transport, petrol, car maintenance, car rego etc etc??

 

I think there is a lot of underestimating that goes on. The last few years at the end of each financial year I have exported all my bank accounts/cards to excel, categorised each transaction and got an accurate tally of the expenses of the prior twelve months.

It is a great exercise and I would encourage everyone to do it. It is quite eye opening, and gives you a good idea where to best focus for saving money.

 

For me it is everything. All money spent for the year, even one off expenses. I have extremely detailed records of what was spent.

 

Based on what? Mine is not an estimate. Mine is an actual. I can tell you dollars and cents exactly what I spent in any financial year and what I spent it on. Every dollar I spend is recorded automatically.

 

Do you have software or app to do it automatically? I do it manually through a spreadsheet

 

Care to share if its on Excel - would love to see what we could improve on

 

That’s really good, sounds like you are very disciplined with it. I take my hat off to you keeping it at $23k/year. In our home we have hit $23k by the time we have paid for childcare and groceries!

 

Credit card statements and bank statements. I only spend cash on lunches and coffee so I know where the cash goes. The rest is itemised as per the credit card statement so it's fairly easy to account for.

 

Yep. Kids are expensive!

Other big costs I don't have:
alcohol: $0 (on average per month) because I rarely drink
entertainment: $17.79 (on average per month) because I am spending a lot of time working through my gaming backlog

Other costs are lower than others I know, including:
groceries: $390.11 (on average per month) because we are buying discounted fruit and veg and cooking a lot from scratch
electricity: $121.07 (on average per month) because electricity is way cheaper in Perth than the eastern states and we don't run appliances we don't need running
petrol: $130.83 (on average per month) because I don't drive to work, which saves heaps!