I told you that March should be the back-to-reality month, and so it was. More rough than expected actually.
On the other hand, income was a bit higher thanks to the sale of children stuff as well as my iPad.
We’ll keep decluttering our life so expect more of these income sources in the future. I’ll post a dedicated article about this once I’m over applying the advices from the book “The Joy of Less, A Minimalist Living Guide: How to Declutter, Organize, and Simplify Your Life” that I will start to read soon.
Back to money!
What about expenses?
Overall, March was a rather usual month if we compare it to the budgeted expenses.
We overspent about CHF 50 in the groceries category due to an unexpected dinner with friends and some unnecessary fast food. Both were very cool and worth the expenses for the great time we spent with our friends and family!
I keep saying that but it’s not to find myself an excuse, it’s really because some things in life do not have a price tag!
March got as well its own medical issue. This time, sun and spring arriving, I had to buy some medications to counter-attack the hay fever that got me by surprise. I didn’t realize we were already mid-March!
Nothing serious thankfully!
On the gas consumption side, everything went as planned with few car trips to go here and there, like to the “Salon Immobilier de Lausanne” for instance (which wasn’t as cool/big as we would have expected).
Something I never mentioned so far because it is recurrent - but still we have to pay it - are the fees for our rent, payment of our health insurance and children activities.
The two first are mandatory fees that we always work on in order to keep optimization at its highest level.
On the more fancy side, we enjoyed the carnivals period with our children and also had a wonderful movie evening with “Ice Age 4”. I think I loved it even more than my kids! This last episode of the series is a pure gem! I definitely recommend it!
We also subscribed to the “ASLOCA” (Association Suisse des Locataires) as we still have issues with our rental property management. We will need lawyer advices soon which will be free after we paid our CHF 60 membership fee. I’ll talk about that in details once we’ve experimented it!
Thanks to various factors (including February being a shorter month), children daycare fees were particularly low. That delighted my wife’s third pillar which enjoyed to be maxed out before end of Q1!!!
One big expense that we can attribute to both luxury and health is that I renewed my Freitag bag to go for a backpack (welcome in your thirties, MP!) as my shoulder bag was doing more damages to my back than it was fancy! Thankfully I could sold it at a good price so the new one was at least almost half paid!
In case you don’t know this brand: it’s the story of two brothers from Zurich who were looking for a way to carry on stuff in a bag which could resist to their city biking life, including rain. They then had the idea to recycle truck tarpaulins and seat belts to get a rock solid bag. More infos about the complete story can be found on their website.
Their brand got so trendy that they now have stores all around the world.
Leisure luxury lifestyle wasn’t left aside neither as I had a cool day spent skiing with friends in the near Jura mountains! Who said Mustachians were living a monk life?
On the phone consumption, we were again above the CHF 30 line due to some professional calls. I hope that Xavier Niel will bring some good stuff to Orange Switzerland with his experience with Free in France!!!
Last but not least, the expense of the month which completely destroys our savings rate: my public transport yearly fee - for which the money was saved all along the year but still, that’s almost CHF 2'500 that are out…
This can sound expensive for non-Swiss citizens but trust me, once you experimented trains which are always on time, clean and secure, you don’t go back!
March 2015 savings rate
So, after a good start into the year, March will be the lowest month of 2015 with a savings rate of 15% 12% only (update 03.05.2015: forgot to take into account an expense for job that came after computing on my credit card bill…).
But don’t worry, April reserves us a good surprise regarding income! Stay tuned!
How was March for you???
