January 2019::Slightly overbudget

Each month is an opportunity to be closer to financial independence::January 2019.

Our January expenses were a bit higher than the previous month. However, this was due to two non-recurring spends. First was for booking flight tickets for a hometown trip in August. An early booking helps to save a lot of costs as tickets are expensive later.  

The second was for buying a 3-year

hosting service from Bluehost. I moved this blog from Blogspot to WordPress after reading many articles on the internet.  

Our savings were 75% of the income and expenses were 25%. We felt good to achieve these numbers but are also concerned due to the decline in MFs and stocks.

During the last 1 month, the equity valuation was down by 1.2L. One of our stock(KPIT technologies) was 43% down post demerger.  

Below is the pie-chart for category wise expenses for this month:

 

On a positive note, we brought down our Entertainment expenses from 18%(Dec2018) to 5% this month.

1% of our expenses could have been avoided. We paid a bank penalty due to insufficient funds for an ECS(we totally forgot about an MF SIP). In addition to this, we had a miserable experience with the HDFC Regalia Credit Card rewards program and HDFC preferred banking service. A processing fee was levied on our credit card for a service we couldn’t avail due to terrible slowness on Regalia website.  

Forecast for next month

Febraury is a smaller month and we don’t have any major spends planned. Therefore, we hope to keep the expenses under 20% of the income. We will also keep a close eye on equity market performance as it may further weaken due to the onset of elections. Let’s hope for the best.

Retirement corpus as on Feb 1st 2019 – Rs. 1,14,67,600

Previous month’s update: December 2018