November 2024 – Rainy and cold

November 2024

Overall, November 2024 was a good month. It was rainy in its first half and cold again. We even had the first snow of the season, which was nice. We actually had quite a significant amount of snow for a November month. It was a fairly quiet month and we enjoyed various quiet weekends. It is good because next month will be more packed.

This month, I went to a conference in Berlin with colleagues. It was enjoyable to go back to a conference after a long time without one. The conference was great and I learned a lot. On the other hand, this takes the entire weekend and I have no PTO to recover when coming back, so this was a bit exhausting.

We finally had to turn on our heating system in our house. The nights were much colder in our region and there was not enough sun to warm our house. Middle of November is quite standard to start heating. We also switched to our winter tires.

Financially, it was a good month. I received some shares from my employer and our expenses were more decent than last month. We could still save more and there were several significant expenses, but it was really not too bad. Overall, we saved about 50% of our income this month.

Expenses

Here are the details of our expenses in November 2024:

In total, we spent 11876 CHF this month. Without taxes, this amounts to 5334 CHF, which is lower than our average this year, so it is a decent result.

Multiple things are worth noting this month. I have concluded again a legal insurance for the household. Last year, I had canceled our legal protection insurance, and now I have gotten another one. I am starting too many stupid examples of people being sued for awful reasons that I have changed my stance on legal protection insurance. For our household, it is now worth the peace of mind. After some research, I now went with ARAG.

Our food budget is also quite high, but this is only due to a grocery trip to Aligro where we spent more than 400 CHF, this is more than we usually buy there. It seems prices have also inflated significantly there.

Finally, the personal category is a bit all over the place. I bought a recumbent bike at Decathlon to train again some cardio. In the past, I did it on a standard indoor bicycle, but I had to stop because of my back. Now, I can start again my cardio trainings. It was a fair price at 360 CHF and if I use it enough, it will be well worth the cost. Other than that, we had multiple gifts and multiple small trips with the family. I also went to the dentist for a standard cleaning, which is definitely not getting cheaper. Finally, there is the usual daycare fee for our son and the German course for my wife.

Overall, I think we could have done slightly better on the personal expenses, but overall, I am happy with this level of expenses since we are below our average spending for the year.

2024 Goals

Here is the status of our goals by the end of November 2024:

Our financial goals are still not doing well this month. However, we have slightly increased our average savings rate this month as well as reduced our average spending. Even though these 3 goals will be failed this year, I still think we are making progress.

On the other hand, we managed to reduce one extra bill again. Our heating bill is going down from 165 CHF per month to 120 CHF.

My health goals are doing well. I am still using my treadmill enough during the week. And I am now being very consistent with my strength workouts. And I have started again with my cardio workouts since getting the recumbent bike. Our power consumption is stable, but we will not meet this goal unless we turn off the house next month.

Overall, I am happy with the status of our goals this month.

FI Ratio

Here is the progress of our FI Ratio as of November 2024:

Our net worth increased quite well this month thanks to the stock market rally. This is great to see some very nice stock market returns on our accounts.

On the other hand, our average expenses keep going up, so our target keeps moving away from us. Given the amount of taxes we are paying now, I think our true target will be somewhere between the two lines.

I think this result is quite decent. We are still far away from the goal, so we should not stress too much about it.

The Blog and some code

There was really not much happening for the blog this month. My motivation was low, so I kept the work on the blog to the minimum: writing an article per week, answering all the comments and answering the emails.

For some reason, this was the worst month in traffic in two years. I do not know whether the blog is falling in rankings or if there are simply fewer people interested. It will be interesting to see the trend next year.

In the coming months, I may write a bank comparator, like I did for broker and Robo-advisors. I think it would be a good addition to my toolkit. And I am also starting to think about a proper retirement calculator, but this will farther in the future.

Not really related to the blog, but I have finally added some import features into my budgetwarrior tool. I can now automatically insert all my expenses from our Neon account through their CSV export. And I can do the same with Cembra but in this case, I need to first extract a CSV from the PDF of Cembra because Cembra app is terrible at exporting anything. I should probably have done that a long time, since it was fun to do, and it will save me a lot of time in the future.

Next month, we will have a meetup on the 14th, organized in the forum. It is not too late if you want to join. The organization was not great (my bad, entirely). I will do better next year and try to organize something in March, maybe.

Next Month – December 2024

Next month is already December. As usual, December will be quite busy with multiple events for Christmas and new year. Since I had to take many days of PTO to take care of my son these last few months, I do not have any PTO left for the holidays. So, this is likely going to be a tiring month.

For the blog, I do not expect much with the holiday season. Moreover, my wife is going to start a temporary job in mid-December. As a result, I will have significantly less time for the blog during the week. We will see how that goes.

Financially, it should be entirely standard. There may be slightly higher than usual expenses, but probably not much.

What about you? How was November 2024?

Recommended reading

• More articles about Updates
• February 2018 Update – Vacation and wedding
• Our trip to Orléans, France – Beautiful City
• June 2019 – Holidays, Taxes and Insurances!