March In Review

March was a tough month for me, surprisingly. I actually went waaaay over budget in many, many categories. Fortunately I keep about a $500 to $1,000 buffer of cash in my chequing account, mainly because I don't like to dance too close to $0 -makes me panic just a little bit.

My income this month was a whopping $3,336.00! That was mainly because of my nice tax refund, which I plopped directly into savings.

This is what my budget looked like for March. The colors that I've added are the transition from my old broken down budget to a new enveloppe-type system as explained here.
I'm very surprised that even though I (nearly) sucessfully completed Krystal's Food Challenge, I still spent almost my whole budget for food!

Looking at the money I've spent on food:

Looks like most of it was spent on either dining out or groceries. I think that since I wasn't eating out for lunches during the week, I gave myself an excuse to eat out and buy lots of groceries on the weekends. Plus I also treated a couple people out to sushi on several occasions, which can add up!

Good news is, even though I did overspend this month, I still contributed $1,400 to my savings!

So far this is where my accounts are sitting at:While it looks like I have acheived my goal of saving over $10,000, in reality that goal was set for my London Savings only, so I'm about half-way there. I'm still definitely making progress, though! On the bright side, I'm well ahead of shedule for my London Fun Fund, which is sitting at $3,392! While I set a goal of $5,000 for that fund, I may extend it given how fast it's comming!

For those of you of a more visual variety, here's my savings goal chart courtesy of ING Direct.

I won't upload the one for the London Fun Fund yet, as I have yet to deposit the cash from my wallet into TD to be transfered to ING Direct. Yeeesh.

I am a little bummed that ING Direct has dropped its interest rate down to 3.3%. Sucks big time. Oh well, I will live with it, but it would've been nice to have it stay up there at 3.65%.

My net worth is now a whopping: $10,407!

Here is my little chart, courtesy of Networth:


It's actually very satisfying that my graph has a little bend in it now. Before it was just a straight line, and without any real numbers on the chart, it wasn't a nice. Now it's a little bit curvy. Excellent.

April's budget and goals to follow!