Recap: Spending and saving in May 2015

So I've been pretty quiet this month in this blog. But it's less because this month was a quiet month as opposed to I was overcome with a strong sense of 'I would like to waste my time doing something else' in May.

I will additionally admit that my slow as hell recovery from appendicitis also played a role in my return to normalcy in general.

So... May. A month where not much has happened due to the aforementioned illness and therefore I spent most of it just going to work or laying low at home. That had its own consequences but on the other side, it also meant that there's very little as a whole to report.


SPENDING: Shockingly, I was actually completely under-budget for the month when everything was all said and done. That is to say, I planned to spend "X" dollars on bills and discretionary spending this month and I happily went about $40 beneath it. And that's with having to pay an extra $50 into my rent for the air conditioner I wanted to install.

And yet with that said, I blew up my food budget to kingdom come yet again due to the excessive laziness that was borne out of my lack of energy to really do any home cooking. How much did I blow it by? About $50. So... yeah. There's that. And it has led me to consider possibly changing a few things in my budget. But more on that later.

Overall at least, the spending was mostly kept in check by me being a homebody most of the month and I kept out of trouble in all other areas of my budget. So really I don't have that much to complain about as far as where my money went and how for this month.


INCOME: The good news is that I lost zero dollars due to April's illness. The bad news is that I didn't make a whole lot of extra money for the month of May.

My income amounted to me getting one freelance cheque at just under $200 for May and that was it for the extra cash. Everything else I made was my base salary from work and that's it. No overtime included. Blech.

So yeah, I really didn't do a whole lot on this front. Luckily I made a ton the previous month and as I had all that extra money from April more or less unaccounted for, I dipped into that extra to pay into some of the things that needed to be paid into.

For instance...


DEBT REPAYMENT: As I was a little short on the $200 extra I expected to earn each month, I admit that some of last month's extra was dipped into this month to cover the cost of paying that self imposed minimum payment to my credit card. Which was fine as it would have either gone to debt repayment or my savings anyway. And this scenario is exactly why I paid extra into the credit card when I could prior to it. Even if the interest rate is a tiny 0.99%.

As for the student loans, I just managed to go over the minimum required amount required to contribute to my student loan debt monthly by also dipping into the extra I was sitting on from the previous month to the tune of $80.

So all in all, pretty normal and routine for the month as far as debt repayment goes. I mean, no lie, I would have preferred to have been able to put more money in this general direction as a whole, but again, I only had so much to work from and for what it was worth, didn't do too shabby in making the best of it as it were.


SAVINGS: This month was all about getting myself some well rounded numbers in my savings account. So any account that was treading a few dollars away from being over a hundred as opposed to beneath it meant that I threw a couple extra dollars on top of the planned savings I already had in place.

This meant that I ended up setting aside $60 dollars more than I originally planned. And before you ask where I got the money, the answer is, I made a lot of extra money last month on overtime that I didn't allocate, that's how.

NET WORTH: $-24,282.75 (+4.18%)

I really can't complain here. Sure I didn't hit the $1,250 a month I kind of need to make it to the $15,000 net worth I'm aiming towards, but all things considered, I'm not upset about not making it either because I at least made it to that bare minimum $1,000 I do want to make. So there's that.

But I'm pretty well ahead at this moment on my goal, and with a very very busy June on its way thanks to some extra work coming up this month, some overtime and a triple paycheque July, I'm all set to hopefully make the money I need to hit my ultimate goal. At the very least, I seem to be moving in the right direction.