Income, Expenses & Savings, February 2020 – £1333.2 Saved

Amigos, welcome to my first income, expenses and savings report, or in other words, welcome to half of my previous monthly updates.

You may be thinking: “What is this Spaniard guy messing around with now?”

Simply, I’ve decided I am gonna spam your email accounts guys as much as possible as it makes me happy. Haha…

Now, seriously! =^-^=

At the end of 2019, I optimistically set a bunch of goals for 2020. While I started the year strong and I have been doing well so far, I am starting to feel a little worn-out, and taking that we’re only starting with the third month of the year, I am worrying I will fail on most of my goals, same as it happened last year.

Getting my monthly updates ready consumes a tone of my time, and it normally “ruins” a weekend per month. When that happens, I find myself “working” non-stop for at least 12 consecutive days. Also, the RHS Chelsea Flower Show is coming up soon, which literally means we’ll be all panicking the British way (or The Fawlty Towers way put differently) soon at work.

So, in aims to equally space “workload” and keep the focus on my 2020 goals, I came up with the idea of splitting my monthly updates into 2.

The first one will focus on my income, expenses, savings, goals and any life updates, whereas the second will mainly show the portfolio numbers updated. Hope you don’t mind?

I will try it that way for a while and come back to my normal updates type if I don’t see a benefit from it.

Besides all of that, I will be soon introducing another meaningful change on the blog:

A millionaire interview series is about to begin! 😀

I am excited to start interacting with already-made millionaires and learn as much as possible from their wisdom. So far, there are 4 confirmed millionaires who are willing to take part in the experience, so stay tuned if interested!

On the meantime, I am afraid you’ll have to settle for watching a few thousands only 😛

Income, Expenses & Savings Rate

February was another super quiet month. We had plans of meeting up with some friends in Brighton over one of the weekends, but these were postponed all over and over again as the weather conditions were “too good to be true”.

We enjoyed Valentine’s day and celebrated our 5th anniversary together. Misses future million someday enjoys cooking for special dates, so even that turned out to be pretty cheap.

This is an overview chart of my income, expenses and savings rate so far:

My total net income in February was £2,215 (2,575 EUR) and my expenses were only £881.8.

I was able to save £1333.2, that results in a savings rate of 60.2% :D.

My savings average ratio is getting closer and closer to the 50% line goal and currently sits at 48% (47% last month).

Monthly Cash Flow Sankey Diagram

Breaking it down into categories, this is how my cash has flown during February:

Income

In February I didn’t get paid any affiliate income at all. This has been reduced to nearly nothing since the K&E cases.

I was lucky that someone used my Trading212 referral link to join the platform and I was given a free share of AstraZeneca worth 88.56 EUR! Thanks! 🙂 (now worth much less after the sell-off though). This is updated on my dividend portfolio, which is the only stake that gets periodically updated (it’s bleeding at the moment!). If you want to give Trading 212 a try, please consider using this link to get your free share.

In January I added ads on the blog to test them out. I know they can be annoying at times, but they can be helpful to cover the maintenance cost of keeping the blog up. I won’t get paid until I reach a minimum threshold of £60. So far I got almost £26. Remember that, if I ever get paid, 50% goes to charity. Hope readers don’t mind.

Expenses

Besides being the shortest month of the year, we’ve enjoyed from almost 5 full weekends, which also means 5 rental payments, as we pay weekly. That escalated my rent and bills expenses to £500 (£450 last month).

I spent £215.91 (£211.5 last month) on groceries, which is among average numbers. We buy all groceries we can from Lidl, and the remaining from Tesco. My Fordkari is being helpful to make us save money in groceries 🙂

Transport includes fuel expense and car taxes. It’s great to work close by in this area (massive traffic jams) as it means that I don’t spend much on transport: £67.5 (£57.5 last month).

Health expenses include the gym membership of £25 that I am greatly enjoying. I am normally going three or four times per week, so, so far I am keeping it up 🙂

I spent £52 on gifts for Valentine’s day and some lovely flowers.

Services include phone, blog expenses and others: £16 (£31.15 last month).

Shopping includes a second-hand book I bought for £5.43 (£31.89 last month).

Goals

Time to have a look at how I am keeping on with my 2020 goals. As Peter Drucker said 40 years ago, what gets measured gets improved.

Some of my goals aren’t monthly measurable, but some others are. I’ve built a simple table to display the progress.

As I noted above, so far I am not doing too bad, but I should put more attention into reading. “The little books of big dividends” is short and I am halfway through Elon’s biography, that should put me on track of reading one book a month soon. I see people reading one book per week, but I like spending time on digesting the book unless it’s a fiction or biography one. It took me ages to read “the millionaire next door” as I spent time on highlighting and summarising the book.

I started 2020 weighting 91Kg and since then I’ve lost 2kg. I could do better but as I do a lot of weightlifting in the gym my muscles are also heavier. 38.3% of my body mass is a muscle (37.7% before) 😎

I am a few steps short, but I am confident that during the summer I’ll burn the sole of my running shoes, so this doesn’t bother me much.

That was it, my amigos! 🙂 How was your month?

Next week I’ll get into updating my portfolio. (Spoiler: My balanced ISA returns for 2020 are still positive so far YAAAS!)