Retire from 8 to 5 

Once we got over “splurging” our initial few full-time job paychecks, reality set in, and we started to keep a close eye on our incomings and outgoings. While living in the USA, we used a combination of Mint and Personal Capital to do build these graphs, since we had multiple credit cards and multiple bank accounts each. Either of these tools help pull all expenses from credit cards, categorize them and display in a summary format. However, in the UK, with such limited credit card offers, we only have 1 credit card each, and 1 bank account each, and its pretty easy to build this graph ourselves. Also, its definitely more fun to do it independently.

The graph below shows our January 2024 income and expenses.

• Every January we dip into our savings pot to make the 10% maximum overpayment allowed on our mortgage. In the USA, our mortgage did not have an overpayment limit, and hence, we were able to make the overpayment at any point, and whenever we had some leftover savings. Here, we target making the overpayment within the first few days of January because we hate compound interest, when it works against us. More on this overpayment approach and why it is awesome on a later post.
• New cell phone – we keep our electronics for a very long time, both for frugality and because we want to do our part to reduce landfill. Unfortunately, one of our 8yr old Samsung Galaxy S8s was tossed into the toilet by our ungrateful toddler during a potty training tantrum meltdown. Despite S fishing it out, and putting it in rice, that phone was lost to eternity, and we needed to replace it. This was a major chunk of our 3.1% shopping cost.
• And we can never not make home improvements – more on this later. But we replaced old vinyl with laminate floor in our kitchen, leading to 1.1% home improvement costs.

Typically, we like to see 50% of our income in savings (i.e., one person’s full paycheck is banked), and this was easily achievable (thanks to our frugal ways) until our son was born in December 2020. Since then, our monthly savings has dropped to 35-40% typically because 15% is childcare, i.e., nursery fees and other child-related expenses. And in January 2024, similar to January 2023, this category dropped to 0%. Once a year, we are ok with 0% monthly savings, because it serves a long term purpose.

Whenever possible, we put work travel costs on our personal, not corporate credit cards, to allow for any meagre points to be earned from the expenditure. All these graphs will have some work-related travel reimbursements, and we haven’t spent the time to clean-up data to that extent. It is a net neutral impact to the overall data.