March 2018 Family Household Spending & Saving Update ¦ Real Family Budget Report

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This is the first in a monthly series that I feel inspired to share with you all.

Welcome to our first Family Household Spending and Saving Report (A REAL FAMILY BUDGET YOU CAN COPY THAT WORKS TOO!).

My mission for this blog is help others work towards financial and time freedom, and that means putting your money to smarter spending, smarter saving and then making sure you do some smarter living along with it.

Family Household Spending & Saving Update ¦ Real Family Budget Report #budgeting #financialfreedom #goals #debtfree

So below you will find the exact tools and strategies I use with my family’s incomes for doing just that and our progress towards our ultimate goals.

Feel free to copy and use these for your own family, and I would love if you would like to share your budgets to compare using the hashtag #realfamilybudget too.

 

// Our Long term Goals

I take what I say and preach on this blog about creating a life of financial freedom and security, to create the balance of time and lifestyle of your dreams, very seriously.

Our family are working towards that very goal, and we are on target to hit it within the next 10 years, to retire early and live off our side businesses and investment increases.

In fact, with the power of compound interest and extra hard work than normal – it might be even sooner than that!

Our family knows the exact amount of money in Investments we need to reach in order to live off the interest payments indefinitely, and it isn’t rocket science.

You can calculate your value as your goal too here.

For any financial goal, whether it be to pay off debt like we have (we paid off £22k of credit card debt in the past few years alone with these strategies learnt) once you have the exact amount to work towards it will start to become reality as you take action towards it.

// Our 2018 Money Goals

We have a few buckets of money goals this year ahead, to keep us on track to hit our financial freedom long term goal but also so that we can live life comfortable and plan for the future.

This includes saving each month towards a bucket of money for Christmas and Home improvements, Insurance bills etc.

Next we have a large goal towards Invested money for 2018, which is a stretch on our normal comfortable saving pattern on Autopilot.

Then we are planning on holidays throughout the year and next, so we have a budget goal for that account.

Finally, we wish to create a 6 month Emergency Money account.

This means if we lose our regular incomes we would have 6 month’s worth of money saved to cover all the essential bills and food & petrol.

It’s then our job to recover those incomes within that time.

I should say that if you follow my Budget planning video, you will know that we apply a 10% additional payment to our Mortgage and Car payments, so that we will pay those off earlier than forecasted but also it allows a buffer if we needed to remortgage to a lower monthly amount if we were unemployed for any reason – and not lose our home!

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// Our March Budget

Start of the month, our main savings amounts go straight out on autopilot standing orders to our budgets so that we save without even questioning it.

We pay ourselves first, then use the rest to have fun and live life.

This means even our investments are calculated and paid at the start of the month, so that we are not tempted to spend that money first.

Our Food & Petrol money account and our Family Fun money is then our free money to manage the rest of the month as we see fit.

The goal is to spend it on things that bring us joy, and it isn’t a challenge to make sure we have some left over.

Any left over from these money accounts though at the end of the month is usually transferred to our Emergency Goal account or Invested.

Then we start over the next month on a zero budget afresh.

If you want to learn more about the Electronic Cash Envelope System I use each month, working with a Zero Budget system, please check out this post here.

// How did we do this month?

Here is the screenshot of how much we saved over from our cash budget accounts, and how we are doing to targets for end of 2018 financial goals.

You can also see how we are doing to our overall Financial Freedom target.

 

// How are doing towards our 2018 Goals?

This month, House & Christmas fund was striped bare this month, as we decided to buy out the remaining part of our home that our builder’s still owned legally (15% of our home).

This is a huge step to making sure that all our mortgage payments are now focused on us having this home bought outright in the coming years, and us living in it without a mortgage payment.

Our mortgage monthly amount has gone up as a result, but we have already planned for that extra expense in April’s budget amounts.

We also decided to use some money to set up Wills for our family, a once in a decade expense.

We also used money from the household fund to pay for our Home contents insurance, and that means that is paid for the full year ahead again.

Our family holiday in June is also completely paid off now as a result this month, so that account is bare and ready to save for next year again.

Our goal will be to build up this fund once more of course for other such expenses.

It was lovely to have some money left over from our Food, Petrol and Family Fun money accounts and this went straight to our investments this time.

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// What went well and what can we do differently next month?

This month we had a lot of expenses, but with our system it meant we were prepared and able to cover the full amounts without anything putting us into debt.

We also increased our additional contributions to our mortgage in prep for the builder buy-out this month, so it is lovely to see we coped fineand able to still enjoy life as a family.

Be sure to check out my Youtube channel to never miss an update video on our budget, and for advice and tips on how to set up your own budget that works.

 

 

 

 

 

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