2019 spending

In the last year I started to pay much more attention to how I spend money. I'll write much more about the reasons at some point, but the short version is that I care a lot about autonomy and agency, and spending less is a critical part of that.

I set myself a target of £2000/month for 2019. The median take-home salary in London is £2250/month, so this is hardly a stretch, but it's a start.

Today I went through my accounts for the year to see how that worked out on average:

• £1969 - total
  • £1090 - basics
    • £823 - rent
    • £50 - council tax
    • £30 - physical bills
    • £35 - digital bills (4g data, fastmail, sr.ht, matrix, tarsnap, netlify)
    • £152 - groceries
  • £261 - fun
    • £155 - climbing
      • £83 - travel to crags
      • £44 - gym membership
      • £28 - gear
    • £33 - parkour
    • £53 - kindle
    • £20 - spotify + steam
  • £282 - luxuries
    • £130 - eating out
    • £113 - things (kitchen equipment, clothes etc)
    • £39 - TfL (aka too lazy to bike)
  • £336 - holidays and travel

(Not included here is £1456 spent so far on applying for permanent residency in Canada.)

The most important thing I notice is this:

• Most of the things that made this year worthwhile - time with friends, climbing, parkour, coding, biking, reading, music, camping, wandering around the city - barely show up financially.

• Conversely a large chunk of my spending (although much reduced from last year) is spent on eating out, random impulse purchases and compensating for poor planning, most of which I don't remember.

In general there isn't much correlation between how much money I spend on things and how much they add to my life. So even though I spent less this year than usual, I was able to spend a lot more time doing things I care about by deliberately directing money towards high-value activities instead of it being siphoned off by every passing offer.

I'm hoping to move to Vancouver in the spring. This is my rough goal for spending after settling in (informed mostly by numbeo and craigslist):

• £1475 - total
  • £890 - basics
    • £600 - rent (pessimistic estimate - much cheaper than London but also oversubscribed)
    • £30 - physical bills
    • £60 - digital bills (mobile plans are much more expensive)
    • £200 - groceries (UK has anomalously cheap food)
  • £265 - fun
    • £105 - climbing
      • £30 - travel to crags (rideshare or bus to Squamish)
      • £45 - gym membership
      • £30 - gear
    • £100 - parkour (based on unlimited classes at Origins)
    • £50 - kindle
    • £10 - spotify (deleted steam account)
  • £220 - luxuries
    • £100 - eating out (cheaper in Vancouver)
    • £100 - things
    • £20 - transport (smaller city, bike-friendly)
  • £100 - holidays and travel (this year was unusually high due to bad planning - 100 is typical, plus less need to go to exotic locales when living in BC)

Projections will need updating after talking to an accountant, but based on my current understanding of the Canadian tax system I need ~4 more years at my current salary until I'm more or less financially independent.