2022 Mid-Year Spending and Savings Update

I haven’t been posting my spending each month as I have done previously. Primarily because I didn’t have a savings rate goal in mind. However, I have still been tracking expenses every month so I thought it would be a good idea to really assess where my money is going and perhaps make a few changes in the ending months of 2022. And I realise now that I definitely have to reel in the spending!!!!!!! (where I can).

6-Month Spending and Savings Rate Table (including business expenses)

Here are the total expenses for each category that I’m tracking. You will notice that Nathan’s Mobile PT, my business I started in 2021 has been included for the expenses (mostly advertising and staff wages). While it skews the overall totals for expenditure per month, it does go towards my savings rate and total income as well, so I kept track of it.

**This table includes my income and expenditure of my business.** While this is a good representation of my total income and expenditure all included, the savings rate of 19.6% is definitely not a good measure of my personal savings habits. Unfortunately the tracker I’ve been using is a bit difficult to show each income source without looking into the data… so I did that and you can see my personal savings rates below.

6-Month Spending and Savings Rate Table (excluding business expenses)

So my expenses removing all business expenses are very eye-opening. Especially looking at the Monthly and Weekly averages columns… Now I definitely knew that my rent and now mortgage was the highest expenses and I would have guessed that shopping/items (items not including groceries or from any other category) was high. A few health/medical things came up which are always suprising (dentists can be very expensive for one).

Another way at looking at the expenditure of each category is with an awesome graph:

The rest of the expenses are fairly low when looking at the monthly costs and the percentage of expenditure (far right column). However, they all add together and create a huge monthly expenditure. $214 per month on eating out doesn’t sound like a huge amount, but couple that with $370 groceries, $217 on car expenses, and other things like $229 for entertainment it all gets pretty out of hand.

Here is my savings rate for the first 6 months of 2022. 22.2%. Not great. A few months due to some large expenses were actually at a very small loss, which is definitely surprising but I have felt that I’ve had less extra money recently, which makes sense haha.

Key Takeways

Looking at the numbers now, it’s really clear that I spend quite a lot of money on a lot of different things which end up building up per month!
Overall monthly spending comes in at ~$4,100 on average. Which is insanely high – and almost unbelievable because it doesn’t feel like I’m spending that much. This is the beauty of tracking expenses.
How do I spend $950 per week (while that includes $220 for mortgage, that’s still insane).
While my savings rates have been alright in the earlier months (30-41%), there were a few months where I saved no money. That was quite surprising and definitely not sustainable when I’m trying to increase my net worth.
Some categories I feel are definitely required (rent/mortgage, health/medical, groceries, utilities, fitness, car to a degree). However, some categories which aren’t fully a necessity (shopping/items, entertainment, eating/drinking out) are taking up a lot of my money per month.

I’m feeling a little tired and burntout of the process. What I might do is start tracking all expenses for the first half of 2023 to then compare rather than track the rest of 2022.

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