Just a month ago, we actually established a budget of $42,000 for our expenditure in 2017. This translates to a $3,500 monthly budget and to give ourselves some leeway in the first few months, I gave an additional $5,000 buffer. Unfortunately, in this month alone, we have used up $2,000 of the $5,000 buffer as there were plenty of birthday/wedding celebrations and Chinese New Year was also in January this year.Furthermore, we paid another $1,100 for two air tickets to Melbourne. So honestly, the higher expenditure is not unexpected. I had actually anticipated our expenditure to be above $6,000 this month (1/7 of the budget) so I am actually quite happy for it to come in at only $5,500. Let’s see if we can keep to an average of $3,300 for the rest of the year to meet the target. The breakdown for January 2017 is shown below.

---

Eating Out: $1,060.......