Diary of an up and coming sociopath

Finally, the day has come where I can look at a big hastily constructed graph of my month’s spending and go “Hmm.” in an attempt to figure out where it all went wrong. This is a slightly modified version, in that I took off the Red Dwarf DVD, which while I “bought” it on monday, it hasn’t been shipped and thus, no money has left my account, and I added the gas and phone bills because the money for the former has now left my account, and I forgot to mention the latter due to the roundabout way it was paid (I lent Ian some cash, and we called it even for my part of the phone bill.) I have decided to continue this experiment for another month, if only because it was such a miserable failure this month. Instead of reducing what I spent, I was simply more aware of how much money I had which led to me spending vastly more than was necessary on my credit card bill, and gig tickets, and the like. It has given me a benchmark though. Tangible data to compare to, and targets to reduce. Allow me to analyse.

This graph lets us compare my spending per day, with the cumulative total. Obviously the rent offsets things a bit. You can see I managed roughly a week before I stopped trying to spend less money. I only broke £50 a day when I paid the council tax, my credit card bill and bought gig tickets, but then that’s a ridiculously unsutainable amount of money in itself. My daily average worked out at £31 a month. That’s the amount to beat. This month, I have to lower that average in time for the 25th of March, so I’ll be keeping a closer eye on how what I’ve spent compares to the daily average for the month, as much as the cumulative amount.

Back here I did an entry to start this whole process off where I attempted to predict future spending and assigned myself the monthly total of £734. An amount I vastly overshot. Let’s see why.

Things started off quite well. For some reason I was convinced I was spending a lot of money in the opening weeks, but as we can see the gradient really shoots up after I pay my rent, which (as well know) indicates I was spending a more money in less time. I ascribe this fully to the earlier phenomenon I spoke of where keeping track of my money left me far more aware of how much richer I was than I thought. I put off buying ben folds tickets for absolutely weeks, but my nerve broke the day before I paid my rent and I bought one. Almost immediately afterwards, garbage announced a gig and I bought nikki and I tickets. I also paid a hefty chunk of my credit card bill. These one-time payments amount to £168 that I would otherwise have only spent £25 of (being the mandatory amount for my monthly credit card payment.)

I bought travelcards on the 25th, 1st, 8th, 15th and 22nd, which was one more week than I was expecting. That’s £125 on travel to work alone. Including Petrol, which cost me £47 this month, (and was way more than the £25 I allocated) my total travel costs were £152. I’m currently overshooting the mark by £143 from the tickets/credit card, and I can now add £27 of unexpected travel costs to that.

I spent £95.13 on food. This is £35 more than I expected. The entirety of which can be directly and exactly attributed to buying food at the chip shop, McDonalds, the sandwich shop up the road from work, and the trip to Nandos, the last of which is a one-off thing and the second of which is something I’ll be avoiding this month. Currently exceeding expectations by £205.

For comics, I was almost spot on. Cost me £17.83, plus £2 for a comic which Nikki bought for me, and that leaves me just under £20. Unexpectedly purchased luxuries (CDs, cinema, etc) cost me £30, and bills cost me £10 more than expected due to a domain renewal as well as gas and phone. Combined with “special occasion” purchases for Valentines Day and Tom’s Birthday, that leaves me £60 more then what I thought. £265 over.

Removing £20 for the CD unit I never got around to buying, this is £245 over my initial estimate of £734. £980. Given some minor rounding errors, that’s almost exactly what spent this month (£988) which means I’m good at noticing where my expenses are going, though Rob pointed out i’m not actually doing much about them, just admitting I’ve made them. Now I’ve identified the causes of the problems, This month is where the savings must happen. I’ll write some more on that tomorrow.