2025 Spending Review

Somehow its been two weeks since I last posted! These two weeks have been busy, chaotic, and fun. There's been juggling work and school holidays (so thankful to grandparents who have helped out 3 days per week!), there have been family birthdays with eating out and even a local waterway cruise for my mum's birthday which was really fun, there has been some entertaining - playdates and having our neighbours over for dinner. And I've been working on my writing too.

E helped me edit this photo of her on the cruise.

Now I can't wait for school to start for the year (next Tuesday), and for us all to get into our proper routines for the year. The kids REALLY need this, and so do Al and I. HA. I'll write more about our plans for routines and season goals in the next post, but today I was inspired by Lisa (blog currently set to Private) and Elisabeth, to share our spending breakdown for 2025, since I find these insights so interesting when I read them on others' blogs.

Couple of notes about our spending pie chart for 2025. First, the categories and estimates are largely set up automatically by our banking app. Very grateful for this because I am yet to consistently manage to track our spending in detail ourselves (either in a spreadsheet or manually in YNAB - there's no automated feature in Australia). Because of this, there will be some minor miscategorisation - for example, when something is bought at a service/petrol station, it will categorised as transport, even if it was to buy bread and milk. Probably 99% of our spending is out of one particular account, so this works well (we very rarely use credit card or cash). So overall, the general trends are captured.

Our Retirement savings, and all of my new car expenses actually come out of my salary pre-tax (novated lease), but I've included them in here for a fuller picture.

The Transport wedge is larger this year (8.4%) because we had to pay for major repairs on our Lancer (sob!), plus we have a car payment on my new car now (though it is heavily tax deducted which makes it a more reasonable expense). We live in a regional area so public transport is not an option, so sadly this expense line will stay fairly high for now. Very grateful for two reliable, comfortable cars, though - I don't take that for granted.

Home (31%) is our largest spending piece, which is our mortgage and rates (property taxes). Houses in Australia is VERY expensive (housing unaffordability is constantly in the news here). This is actually an improvement from when interest rates were at their highest in 2023/24, but its still a BIG chunk and will remain so for a while. On the upside, our house value has increased quite a bit since we purchased in 2022, so it is a good investment over the long term. Plus, it’s lovely not to rent after soo many years renting (we briefly owned a house 2017-2020, but otherwise have always rented).

I'm mostly happy with our Groceries slice (8.2%), as we mostly buy from Aldi and our other discount supermarket, although we could try to avoid the little "top up" trips to our local, expensive supermarket mid-week with a bit more organisation. BUT we do spend a little too much on Eating Out (6.3%). Now, we do love eating out, so I'm happy to spend out a little on this category, but there are definitely times of the week when its for convenience (lunches, or didn't plan dinner, or didn't bring snacks on a trip), rather than joy, and gee it does add up. So there can be some savings to be had there.

Childcare (4.1%) is mostly O's Kindy fees, which were actually significantly lower than a few years ago, when both kids were in full-time care with less subsidy. This will drop to basically nothing now O is starting school this year- woohoo.

Shopping (3.1%) includes clothes, furniture, homewares etc, and as you can see this is NOT a priority for us. In fact, this is an area where we could spend MORE! We definitely have clothes and house items that are falling apart that we don't get around to replacing. We live in a hot climate and right now I have one pair of Birkenstocks and no dressy sandals. Not a sustainable situation!

Maintenance is house related and includes plumbing, smoke detectors, painting etc. Insurance includes home, health, one of the cars (the other is in a lump sum in transport I couldn’t be bothered to separate). Life insurance comes out of our superannuation (retirement fund), and is too hard to pull out for this, so isn't counted. Health and medical (4.1%) includes specialist doctor appointments (we've had a lot this year) and pharmacy - luckily our public system covered O's surgery and any emergency visits, and subsides GP visits and such. Our private health insurance is mostly for elective surgeries (thankfully none this year), dental, optical (Al and I just got glasses), etc.

Travel and holidays (3.6%), and kids activities (0.5%) are pretty low - we haven't had spare cash for big holidays, plus its a bit lost on the kids at this age (even staying in a local hotel is exciting for them still), and we have zero desire to do long plane flights or car trips (the 8 hours drive to Port Macquarie drove us a bit crazy with the kids). For kids activities, E had Scouts and a little bit of gymnastics in 2025, but that's all. I imagine this year will be more as O starts to try activities (swimming and maybe soccer), and I know E wants to try rockclimbing, which is a pricy hobby. Entertainment (3.1%) is mostly a couple of streaming services (Al loves sports so we subscribe to sports channels etc), Kindle books and Patreon for me, Apple Music for us all (definitely worthwhile) and kids activities (playcentres etc) on weekends. There are a couple of subscriptions we could drop, otherwise it is pretty low.

Finally, I'd love the gifts and donations category (1.5%) to be higher, but right now, there just isn't much spare cash. We make one-off donations to causes we care about (animal welfare, independent journalism, local community groups, climate disasters, etc) from time to time, but in a few years I'd love this to be a bigger slice of the pie with more regular support of causes we care about. I'd also love some other long-term savings in there other than retirement (Australians don't tend to need to save for kids university expenses, but some longer term savings for bigger house or travel projects would be nice), hopefully in another couple of years.

Does anyone else track their spending categories like this? (This is the first year I've really looked closely). Any categories you'd like to decrease or increase?