October 2013 Expenditure Tracker

This is the third month of my reset expectations and the second month in which my smoothing technique has started to come into effect.  Although I am still spending far too much on my personal expenditures and not saving enough this month did represent an improvement.  I am starting to control and think about my small expenditures better - things that I don't normally think about but which add up.

Item	Oct 2013	Target (new)	Over/(Under)	Target (old)	Over/(Under)
Share Investments	+$1,094	+$2,500	-$1,406	+$2,000	-$906
Offset Acct.	+$3,050	+$2,400	+$650	+$3,500	-$450
Personal expenditure	+$4,305	+$2,800	+$1,505	+$2,200	+$2,105

As you can see above I performed quite well in my offset account target and my personal over-expenditure almost exactly offset my share under-investment.   The major movements in my 3 accounts are discussed below.  I will discuss my share investments first as it had the most moving parts

• Share investments
• Although you can't see it in the numbers above there was a fair amount of movement in my share investment account this month
• I sold a portion of my holding in FKP because the price was getting a little ahead of itself and I wanted to take some of my gains
• I kept this cash in my share trading account because (as I will discuss tomorrow) the company decided to do another rights issue almost as soon as I had sold out
• I continued to invest in my employee share plan
• I have been holding onto cash that I want to invest in the share market for quite a while however I am assessing my current portfolio before I go out and start looking for new ideas.  I am also uncomfortable at the moment with investing in index funds because the market has run so much
• Home Loan Offset account
• I actually didn't save as much as I wanted to from my wage this month due to several factors including
• An over-expenditure in my personal expenditure account
• I had run down my transaction account reserves which needed to be topped up
• I am saving for some big items in the longer term which are going into my 'expenditure smoothing' account
• However I am still 'in the black' this month because I had some of my deferred cash compensation from last year vest and get deposited into my account
• Personal expenditure
• One of the mildly depressing things about this month was that my personal expenditure was significantly above what I wanted and I did not have any major lumpy costs
• There were a few big items which really contributed to this over-spending in the month (which may recur in coming months including)
• Saving for some longer term items in my smoothed expenditure accounts - at some point I'll write about what this is - however it is about a $7,000 - $8,000 expenditure which I will be making in about a year
• I'm going on holiday in a few weeks and I had to pay for accommodation and some flights.  I am reluctant to call these 'one offs' because they do seem to recur rather frequently

On a cumulative basis my (reset) performance is as follows:

Item	Aug 13 -Oct 13	Target (new)	Over/(Under)	Jan 13 -Oct 13	Target (old)	Over/(Under)
Share Investments	+$3,282	+$7,500	-$4,218	+$17,281	+$20,000	-$2,719
Offset Acct.	+$5,369	+$7,200	-$1,831	+$11,898	+$35,000	-$23,102
Personal expenditure	+$15,725	+$8,400	+$7,325	+$47,627	+$22,000	+$25,627

As in previous months I'm still behind on a cumulative basis however my the incremental change (as seen in the first table above) is not as bad.  In November I typically have quite a large improvement in my performance due to the payment of my bonus and the receipt of my tax refund.  Normally this would all go into my offset account however I am going to place some of this into FKP's new rights issue which should balance out my savings.

You May Also Be Interested In
September 2013 Expenditure Tracker
Expenditure Tracker - All Posts
If you find budgeting hard...try expenditure smoothing
Taking partial profits with shares: a sensible strategy