A look at my income and expenses for the first half of 2018.
One of the things I want to do on this blog is share my income and expenses each month. I’ve always found it useful and interesting to see this on other blogs, and I think it will help showing my actual numbers will help to put this blog into perspective. I’ve been tracking my expenses for a long time, and my income and net worth since the start of this year, so I thought it would be useful to have one of the first posts take a look at the first six months of 2018.
Income
| Income type | 6 months | 1 month (average) |
| Wage | £11,800.20 | £1,966.70 |
| Ms FIRE | £675.00 | £112.50 |
| Interest | £167.78 | £27.96 |
| Total | £12,642.98 | £2,107.16 |
Not too much to talk about here. My girlfriend lives with me and is studying for a PhD, so her wage is a lot less than mine. We’ve agreed that she should contribute ~£115 each month, and then the rest of her income is hers to do with as she wants (buying clothes, food, saving for holidays, etc). I then cover the rest of the expenses, as detailed below. The wage is after tax, national insurance, pension contributions and student loan repayments. The interest, which is so tiny that I almost considered just not including it, is from the money I have sat in a few different current accounts. I currently don’t track any “income” from my investments, as it just gets automatically reinvested.
Expenses
| Category | 6 months | 1 month (average) | % of Income |
| Rent | £3,300.00 | £550.00 | 26.1% |
| Bills | £1,657.32 | £276.22 | 13.1% |
| Groceries & Toiletries | £1,359.79 | £226.63 | 10.8% |
| Eating Out | £409.24 | £68.21 | 3.2% |
| Presents | £238.53 | £39.76 | 1.9% |
| Alcohol | £96.82 | £16.14 | 0.8% |
| Transport | £634.05 | £105.68 | 5.0% |
| Fun | £443.32 | £73.89 | 3.5% |
| One off | £399.52 | £66.59 | 3.2% |
| Holiday | £807.55 | £134.59 | 6.4% |
| Clothes | £128.99 | £21.50 | 1.0% |
| Total | £9,475.13 | £1,579.19 | 74.9% |
Mostly self explanatory. Bills includes (deep breath) gas, electricity, water, council tax, Netflix, mobile phone, internet, home insurance and Playstation Plus. Maybe I’ll break it down more thoroughly in a future Income/Expenses report. “Fun” is a vague category that includes buying CDs, games, concert tickets, etc, and “one-off” is another vague category for random things like furniture, or a new pair of glasses. Again, I’ll go into more detail in future posts.
Savings Rate
My savings rate at the moment is a not too shabby 25%, which ends up as £500 into my stocks and shares ISA each month. There is of course room for improvement, but I think it’s pretty good considering my girlfriend and I are essentially living on a single income. My aim is to try to maintain this for the next two-three years, maybe see if I can push it to 30%, until she finishes her PhD. Then we can split the expenses 50:50 (more or less, depending on who earns how much at that point) and I can increase my saving rate accordingly.