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No Spend Challenge

by | Apr 18, 2016 | Challenges, Wedding

The wedding date has been locked in & is slowly creeping up on us. One of the biggest things when planning a wedding is the all important budget. We’ve picked an amount that is reasonably small, but big enough for us to have the important things to us. I’ve employed quite a few money saving strategies for the wedding, which is a story for another post. I think, if we hadn’t organised for a winter wedding, the cost would have been easily almost another $2000. Which isn’t a laughing matter at all when you are just starting life out together, every cent and dollar counts!

 

Given that we haven’t quite reached our target savings as of yet, I’ve been employing quite a severe regime to save. One of the things that I will be trying to do is to have a ‘no spend’ challenge. At this point, I’m aiming to try it for at least a month & for as long as I can go in an effort to make everything stretch that little bit further. One of my bridesmaids inspired this as she is doing a ‘no spend’ year. She has been unemployed & they’ve just bought a house & are renovating it, so things are a little tight on their end. The rules of the challenge are that you are allowed to buy groceries and food items, replace things like deodorant, shower gel, make up, undies and essentials, but you are not allowed to buy new things. For example, if I want to go to a party, I have to reuse the clothes I have in my wardrobe & am not allowed to buy anything new.

 

I’ve done a bit of a recon of the items in my room and I feel like I’ve got enough cosmetics to last me a lifetime, face creams, body lotions, clothes and stationery to last me till my grandchildren and heaps of accessories that I can reuse to jazz things up. I will be allowed to buy things like petrol, pay bills (duh!), get foodstuff for home. I will not be allowed to buy new clothes, eat out unless I don’t have a choice and random impulse buys when I visit the shop. And cause we are planning the wedding, we will be allowed to spend for wedding related purposes. It will be interesting to see the results after a month of trying this out. Wish me luck! 🙂

The Savings Habit

by | May 11, 2015 | Finance Matters

Lately, I’ve read a lot about the interest rate going down & who the real winners & losers are. It makes pretty interesting fodder during my lunch break.

I thought I’d share a bit about the my savings habits throughout the years, which I think might help out. Please read this with a pinch of salt, what works for me, might not necessarily work for you & bear in mind that I am not a licensed financial planner or do I even work in finance. Now with all the legalities out of the way, here’s my tips on building some savings.

1. Write down your earnings & spending
Do this how ever you are comfortable with – pen & paper, app or even a wall chart. I started out documenting it all in a simple notebook when I first moved to Perth & it’s evolved since, but now I use an app to quantify things. Being able to see what I spend my money on is usually the first step in constructing a functional budget.

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2. Save at least 10% of your earnings
This might sound hard, but trust me it is possible. I worked 2 days a week during uni & saved 10% then, which was quite a big portion as a student. Having that 10% in a high interest savings account & term deposits (back then it was almost 7%), made my meagre savings work for me. I have a modified version of that savings plan currently. All my excess money sits in my mortgage offset account, making my money work for me again.

3. Work out a functional budget
When I say functional, I mean don’t tie yourself down with being rigid about everything you spend each week/month, but be flexible & allow yourself some leeway to buy things or services you might want every now & then. For example, I lobbed my hair off over the weekend, which isn’t normally in my budget but I allow a small amount of money to be able to do stuff with. A girl’s gotta live ya know!

Hope these tips help somewhat in sorting out your finances!