Once again it’s time for my weekly update on how I’m going with my savings challenge. Yes, once again I’m a bit late with this post… As you know, my goal is to save an extra $200 a week either through earning more or spending less. Last week marked six months since I began this challenge and I’m proud to say I’m on track to smash my target of $10K of extra savings by the end of the year. You can check out how I did over the first six months of the challenge here.
After the stellar results over the last couple of weeks, driven for the most part by the extra cash I earned from being on call, this week represented a bit of a return to earth (see what I did there?). I didn’t pick up any extra cash this week which meant I was totally reliant on reducing my spending if I wanted to hit the $200 goal. Unfortunately, this was one of those weeks where the craving for convenience and comfort food was strong. And after six weeks in lockdown, my willpower was weak, oh so weak. So, inevitably I caved and ended up getting take out a couple of times this week.
The first capitulation to temptation came in the form of McDonalds. My wife and I decided to grab and quick and dirty lunch and ventured the 50 meters up the road to our local Maccas. To be fair, we thought we were being clever and were about to grab a meal guilt-free and on the Government’s dime. To boost the economy and keep restaurants in business throughout all the lockdowns, the state government gave everyone a couple of $25 vouchers to use at participating restaurants. Now, I had checked to make sure my local McDonalds would accept the vouchers, and they would. But only if you went inside the restaurant. If you were like me and went through the drive-thru then you’re outta luck. Pretty silly considering they don’t actually want people stepping inside the Maccas due to lockdown restrictions. The result of all this was what we thought would be a free lunch ended up costing us $25 – half of what I try to save each week by preparing lunches at home.
We were pretty good with dinners, for the most part, this week. As usual, we had our three Hello Fresh meals and filled out the rest of the week with low-cost home cooking. Pasta and vegetarian meals are pretty hard to top in the bang for buck stakes. But alas, we came undone at the very last moment. On Sunday night, after struggling to get out daughter to sleep, my wife and I were faced with the dilemma of what to do for dinner. Do we go the easy route and just have scrambled eggs (breakfast for dinner as we like to call it), put in a bit of effort and make an actual dinner or just cave and order something from Uber Eats? You already know what we did. We got gnocchi delivered from the new gnocchi restaurant we heard some strangers talking about at the park that morning (it’s like they inceptioned us).
On the bright side, we did save $50 on our Hello Fresh this week and it’s due, somewhat, to a mistake on my part. Last week, I thought my delivery had been stolen as it wasn’t in its usual spot out the front of the apartment complex when I went to pick it up. So, after some uncharitable (and totally undeserved) thoughts towards my neighbours, I called up Hello Fresh to let them know and to see what they could do. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting them to do anything but it turns out nothing needed to be done in the first place as my delivery hadn’t been stolen. Hard to steal what was never delivered. Apparently, Hello Fresh was dealing with issues due to the lockdown and my delivery had been delayed by a couple of days. With that mystery solved I was happy to leave it at that, but Hello Fresh decided that as an apology for not properly communicating about the delay to give me $50 credit.
I was pretty surprised by this, I certainly wasn’t angling for any discounts or freebies. But I’ll definitely take the savings. Though as nice as this was, it does make me wonder what sort of margins Hello Fresh are making.
The rest of this week’s cuts in spending came from the usual sources. $50 saved from rent thanks to the reduction we scored earlier in the year. And $45 and $17 saved on train fares and gym membership as a result of the lockdown closing everything down.
The week ended on a pretty fun note. My brother gifted me his fancy Nespresso machine as he wasn’t using it. This machine uses the new Vertuo pods which apparently offer more choice in the sizes of coffees you can make. Now, I already had an old Nespresso machine that uses the original pods, thing is I always found it to be a poor substitute for café coffee. Because of this, it would only ever get used when we were stuck inside due to rain and couldn’t get to a café for takeaways. Of course, I’m not expecting this new machine to be café quality. But it may just be good enough where paying $4.30 at the café down the road is not worth the slight improvement in taste. That’s the hope anyway. Between my wife and I, we’d save around $60 a week if the new Nespresso machine breaks the hold our local coffee shop has on us.
Ok, let’s check out the numbers.
Extra Earnings: $0
Reduced Spending: $187
Total Savings: $187
Result: $13 off the target.
Sooo close. Only $13 off, now I’m really regretting that ill-fated Maccas run. Oh well, it was still a pretty good week and who knows, maybe I’ll soon be saving a huge chunk of coin on coffee. That would be nice. But first I’ve got to find space on the kitchen bench for the new coffee machine. The bloody thing is enormous.
Until next time.
-Trevvie
Searching for a Side Hustle 