New Year, Old Budget

Happy New Year, dear readers! I have been abstaining from recreational typing, as my ergonomic keyboard broke on its way to Toronto and I inevitably had a flareup of RSI. So now I have an achey arm as well as an achey back; what a thing it is to be over 45. Youth's a stuff will not endure, indeed.

A reader has asked for a blogpost, but my only interest this evening is household finances. It is very strange, but after a day of reading news, including Church news, and catching up on which unlikely person trashed the Traditional Latin Mass in which staggeringly awful website, I turn to the financial sites and feel soothed. There is something so clean and pure about these financially independent Stoics who, despite never having heard of Exodus 90, live within their means and take ice baths. They go for long hikes, remodel their own bathrooms, turn up their noses at designer bags, fast for three days at a time, eat a lot of vegetables and encourage all their readers to invest in index funds and slowly grow rich. 

Sometimes financial bloggers also publish how much they spent that year and how much they gained or lost on the stock market and how inflation is not really affecting them at all. Inspired by this, I totalled up what Benedict Ambrose and I spent on food over the whole year, and I was quite pleasantly surprised. 

2022 Groceries: £3,722.44

2022  Dining Out:  £2,241.21

Total: £5,963.65

I was surprised because I added up the monthly budgets in my head and was hoping the total would not go too much over £6,000. But I see that the average monthly grocery bill was £310 and the monthly dining out bill was £186.77. Of course, some months we spent much more on groceries and much less on dining out. But all in all, it came out to an average of £497/m. This is not terribly more than the UK national average of £206/m per person, and the fact is that Edinburgh is one of the most expensive cities in the UK for dining out.