(Disclosure: Some of the links below may be affiliate links) I can summarise June 2022 in two extremes: heat and taxes. It has been too hot this month. I do not handle heat well, so it has been hard for me, especially adding on top of sleep deprivation. As for taxes, as I expected, we did not pay enough last year. Our income increased significantly but not the prepayment. So, we are left with more than 10K taxes from last year. I was a bit surprised by the amount. I was expecting less than that. Aside from these two points, I would say it has been a routine month. So, let’s see in detail what happened. June 2022 During the month, we had a big heat wave. I dislike heat, so it was not the best part of the month. I am thrilled to work at home since my home office is much colder than the
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(Disclosure: Some of the links below may be affiliate links)
I can summarise June 2022 in two extremes: heat and taxes.
It has been too hot this month. I do not handle heat well, so it has been hard for me, especially adding on top of sleep deprivation.
As for taxes, as I expected, we did not pay enough last year. Our income increased significantly but not the prepayment. So, we are left with more than 10K taxes from last year. I was a bit surprised by the amount. I was expecting less than that.
Aside from these two points, I would say it has been a routine month. So, let’s see in detail what happened.
June 2022
During the month, we had a big heat wave. I dislike heat, so it was not the best part of the month. I am thrilled to work at home since my home office is much colder than the actual office.
Talking about working from home, I still have no idea when and if I will have to return to the office. For now, we still have several months without needing to return to the office. I hope it stays that way indefinitely.
As for sleep, we had a few better nights of sleep this month. It is still not great, but there may be some hope.
As mentioned in the introduction, we had to pay extra taxes this month. As usual, our paid taxes are lower than the final amount. It is excellent in a sense because it meant that our income increased significantly. But it also sucks to have so much money to pay in taxes in one month.
However, the extra amount is lower than last year. So, at least, this is getting smoother every year. Hopefully, we will break this cycle by next year.
On top of that, we had to pay the notary for the house. We received the bill almost two years after the signature. That is crazy. I almost forgot we had to pay this bill.
Aside from the heat and taxes, this was a fairly standard month. We had some friendly events, mostly bad nights and ordinary income and expenses.
Because of the taxes, we did not save any money this month. But since I paid both canton and county taxes the same month, I will not have extra taxes next month.
Expenses
Let’s see the details of our expenses in June 2022:
| Category | Total | Status | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
| Insurances | 1205 | Above average | Health and household insurance |
| Transportation | 57 | Average | One tank refill and some parking |
| Communications | 152 | Above average | Internet and a new phone plan for Mrs. The Poor Swiss |
| Blog | 1154 | Above average | Internet services and the first pillar |
| Personal | 2367 | Above average | health bills, some gifts, expenses for a family weekend (reimbursed), toys, clothes, … |
| Food | 572 | Above average | Usual groceries and a trip to Aligro |
| Housing | 4428 | Above average | Notary, power, interests, and heating |
| Taxes | 17153 | Above average | Unpaid taxes and new taxes for the year |
In total, we spent an insane amount of 27091 CHF this month.
Without taxes, the blog, and notary fees, this comes down to 4440 CHF, slightly below our goal of 4500 CHF per month.
We paid about 3400 CHF in notary fees for the house. The bill came almost two years after the signature. I was expecting a worse bill, so I am not too shocked with this bill. Compared to the land transfer fees, this is still a reasonable fee.
When we exclude taxes and notary fees, it was not such a bad month. I feel like we could have spent less, considering the significant expenses, but it was still not that bad.
Overall, almost everything is high this month, but most are due to yearly or quarterly fees or exceptional events. I still feel good about this level of expenses.
2022 Goals
Let’s take a look at our goals by the end of June 2022:
Overall, my goals are doing okay.
My FI ratio has seen mixed progress, as you can see in the next section.
I am seeing great progress with my walking goal. With the weather this month, we did many walks, in the evening or early in the morning. On the other hand, my working out goal is doing poorly. My motivation is at all times low for this.
I am finally done with redesigning my office. I should never have tried to do with a non-sleeping infant at home. But I am delighted with the way it turned out. There are a few minor things I would like to tweak, but this is not part of the redesign. And several things will have to wait until later in the year.
I am also done with the investigation into my knees. I went to see a professional, and it turns out there is nothing wrong with them. However, due to my sedentary lifestyle, there are many problems with inflammation mostly. I need to move more and not keep the same position too long. I do not know exactly how I will achieve this, but at least I know what is wrong.
The only goal I am slightly worried about is our spending goal. It looks like we have unexpected monthly expenses that make this goal difficult to achieve. At least it is easy to maintain 5000 CHF per month, and we are not too far from the goal. So, our spending is still very much under control.
FI Ratio
Let’s take a look at our progress toward Financial Independence:
If you are investing in stocks, you probably know that June 2022 was not a great month for them. All major indexes are down significantly for the month. Since a large part of our net worth is invested in stocks, our performance this month was terrible.
On top of that, even our budget is negative this month. This means we spent more money than we made, making another dent in our net worth.
But you can see that at the beginning of the month, our FI ratio went up significantly. What happened? I am using a running average of 12 months for our spending. And we just avoided a costly month when moving from May to June. These bumps will often happen around June since these are the expensive months for taxes.
Overall, I am not worried about our portfolio or our progress toward Financial Independence.
The Blog
I managed to do a little more for the blog than in the previous months. I was able to update some articles and improve the blog on top of keeping up with my weekly schedule. This is good because it has been a long time since I did these tasks this year.
I have many tasks late for the blog, but I am starting to be able to do some of them again. I have very few articles scheduled for next month, so I am not sure I will be able to keep working on these tasks. But at least the blog tasks went nicely this month.
Overall, the traffic on the blog went up slightly this month, which is a good sign. On the other hand, the income is way down, likely due to not having updated content and not fixing minor issues in a long time.
Hopefully, what I was able to do this month will pay off in the following months.
Next month – July 2022
In July 2022, we do not much events planned (thanks for that). We have a wedding to attend and one event, but I will try to keep the number of events low. I want to have some time to do things late in the house and the blog. But as usual, my plans are probably going to go poorly.
Financially, I do not expect anything special next month. It will be interesting to see where the stock market is headed.
What about you? How was June 2022?