Do your own Spending Review! (Part IV)

So far everything has gone smooth - we have a good income, we can set aside some saving and still have something left at the end of the month.

But that might not be always the case - especially if one is not used to track his or her expenses. Now that you have some history - the excel file linked in the previous blog posts should help you building exactly that - it is easy to spot where things might go wrong. 

I would start from the discretionary expenses and check for the biggest categories. 

• How much do you spend when going out? What about when doing groceries? Maybe going to LIDL or ALDI for the basics would not be such a bad idea...
• Review your insurances - e.g. do you really need legal insurance? Have you ever come close to actually using it? Maybe just a normal personal liability insurance will do in 99.99% of the cases
• Review your gym membership and other subscriptions - e.g. Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney +. These are easily money drainers that can go unnoticed. Also if you use services like HelloFresh or similar, consider that you are paying a premium for the convenience of having everything delivered to your doorstep and in the exact quantities you need. 
• Internet and Mobile Phone - do you have the most expensive plan with tons of Gigabyte and ultra fast internet speed? Unless you play online a lot, maybe you could scale down your internet package?
• House Cleaning - if you have a cleaning lady coming every one or two weeks, consider putting the time your self! 

Now, I know what many of you might be thinking - saving 100 Euro a month now, what difference will it make in the long term?!?

I will get to that in the next blog post (here) ;-) 

Until then, this kind of concludes the Spending review topic. In these four blog posts, we discussed an "ordinary way" of keeping track of your spending, define your saving rate and work on curbing down your expenses.