My annual expenses for 2025: $30,768.

At the beginning of the year I usually reported how much I spent last year. In this post I share my expenses in the year 2025.

I learned somewhere that we normally divide our income this way:

1. Mine Expenses for today – These are our current expenses.
2. Mine Past expenses – These are the repayments on the debts we owe.
3. Mine Spending in the future – These will be our savings and investments. They are intended to fulfill a life purpose in the future, which requires some money.

You can decide how much you spend for today, the past and the future.

Saving money to spend in the future requires a trade-off, and we all need to recognize that. Unfortunately, some don’t see the trade-off and struggle with living with money.

By reviewing our expenses, we can be more conscious of our expenses.

My past annual revenue expenditure reports

Updating my expenses has become a common annual update. Not everyone may be interested. However, you may be interested in how my expenses have evolved over the years:

• 2014: $23,798/yr – A summary of the past year’s expenses
• 2015: $22,150/yr – How our family’s annual expenses of $22,150 impact our financial security and financial independence
• 2016: $26,238/yr – My annual expense report – $26,238/yr and the link to financial security and independence
• 2017: $21,723/yr – 2017 Annual Expense Report – $21,723
• 2018: $19,655/yr – Annual expenses and reflections on financial security
• 2019: $23,186/yr – Spending report for the year
• 2020: $22,464/yr – How I spent $22,464 in 2020
• 2021: $27,680/yr – 2021 Annual Spending Report
• 2022: $39,187/yr – annual expenditure in 2022
• 2023: $29,554/yr – Annual Spending in 2023 – Reflecting Spending Consciousness
• 2024: $41,923/yr – annual expenditure in 2024

In the first 3.5 years, expenses consisted of the expenses of three adults. The expenses were spent on two adults for the next 4.5 years. The current expenses (not included in the list above) are the expenses of one person (me).

How I classify my expenses

There have been a few changes over the years in the way I classify my expenses.

I think being on this path of figuring out how to track, budget, and think about your expenses will make you see things differently. The more you learn, the better you can tailor the way you look at your spending in a way that best suits your needs.

Last year I renewed my editions after my father passed away in 2023. The current system is more suitable for someone monitoring their path to financial independence.

I have written extensively about how I feel about my personal money situation My personal notes section.

In general, they are grouped so that I can specifically review the following areas:

1. My most essential expenses (you can read about them in any article). The most inflexible and must be the most conservative.
2. My basic expenses. Often inflexible, but the timing of expenses can be flexible. Mostly conservative.
3. Expenses when I work.
4. Expenses that would come from portfolio sources.
5. Flexible spending. Can be adjusted, scaled up or down depending on market conditions.

The difference between each spending group is based on critical planning characteristics:

1. How flexible or inflexible are the income/spending needs?
2. Do the expenditures require inflation adjustment?
3. Whether the expenses will last forever or end after certain years.

These critical features influence your income strategy in the following ways:

The above is more of an example, not how I want to plan it.

The more inflexible, inflation-adjusting or long-lasting the expenses need to be, the more conservative your income strategy should be.

So it is important how you look at your expenses.

Okay, let’s look at the 2025 annual expenses.

Spending in 2025 – $30,768 per year

This is what my expenses look like:

My total expenses for 2025 are $30,768. This is down from $41,000 last year and the main reason was that I donated less money in 2025.

At the bottom you will see the monthly expenses, the total and the average.

I will use the following paragraphs to explain each group in detail.

Essential Inflexible Expenses – $3,255 per year

Essential inflation spending is a category I look at the most. These are the inflexible expenses that are most essential to life and if they increase based on inflation then I have to spend this in some way.

I thought about this category and came up with the following income planning budget:

Updated January 5, 25. Click to view a larger table.

The expenditure must be incurred by the Daedalus portfolio which I wrote about often, the most recent of which is here. You can read why I mention these items and the corresponding amount in this message.

Reviewing expenses in this category is to see if this template still makes sense.

My expenses in 2024 are about $1,000 higher than in 2023. This time, expenses have fallen back to closer to 2023 levels. The biggest difference is due to expenses in Utilities, Conservancy & Essential Replacements, which saw a decrease from $2,239 to $1,117.

For the sake of clarity, the general items covered here are:

1. Real estate tax – not paid this year but probably paid this month. My FY2026 property taxes are $212 [last year is $172 so that is a 23% increase!]
2. Broadband – $7 per month this year
3. Personal cell phone plan – ​​$15 per month this year
4. Municipal council fees – $89 per month this year (without subsidy) [this is higher. Last year was $78]
5. Utilities (water, gas, electricity) – $0 monthly average [100% offset by U-save
6. Laptop Replacement
7. Mobile Phone Replacement
8. Refrigerator Replacement
9. Toiletries

I probably provision a budget of $3,364 annually for this and so spending $1,117 is still within the limit.

This year I did not replace the fridge, mobile phone or laptop/computer so this explains the lower spending. I do suspect I might replace the computer and mobile phone so the spending is higher.

I saved up $200-$240 annually for each of these replacement, whether I spend in the year or not. This is a discipline way of provisioning for spending that would eventually happen.

My food spending of a total of $1,063 is low compare to about $4,320 because of a few reasons:

1. CDC Voucher subsidizing grocery and food spend.
2. Meal prepping. You can read about my meal prep here.
3. I would usually eat 2 meals a day.

There are those who say the cost and time is not worth it but with the basic food cost approaching $5-6 per meal, food prepping becomes more worth it. Still I do set my budget as $6 per meal for 2 meals a day. With meal prep, I do average $6 in food cost a day. But as you can see the food cost is even lower.

As a worker, the transport cost averages $90 a month but if I am not working, I do think this will go down dramatically.

I did not pay any utilities this year due to U-Save vouchers.

Lastly, I have 2.5 months of Town Council fee rebate in the year.

My essential inflexible spend of $3,255 is lower than the $10,244 plan for in 2023.

Basic Inflexible Spend – $1,952 for the Year

The Essential Inflexible Spend are the spending that allows a person to run for a long time at the minimum.

However, the reality is that you would have to provide for more in the house. Things break down in the home and you want to improve things over time. You also want to provide for more medical needs. You will have to spend on basic inflexible spend but if market conditions are not so good, you can shift when you spend it. But you would ultimately have to spend and cannot cut down much.

I wrote about provisioning $5,160 a year for things like this:

You can read more about this in this post here. This spending will come from Daedalus income portfolio as well.

I spent $1,952 in 2025 and this is not too different than the $2,266 spend in 2024. This is still lower than the $5,160 provision in the year.

Whatever is not spent here (about $3,000 here) is accumulated annually. This is especially so for the excess $1000 in residential home maintenance which will eventually be needed to replace something pretty necessary such as washing machine, painting, 10-15-yearly renovations.

You might also notice that the spending is pretty lumpy and if you are less seasoned with budgeting, you might struggle to make sense of it.

Flexible Spend – $15,928 in the Year

Flexible spend is what you would call your Discretionary spending. The kind of spending that makes life meaningful. This is also the spending that you think you can be flexible about.

Why does this matter in your income planning?

If you are really flexible with this, then if the portfolio is not doing well, then you can cut your spending. You have to deeply reflect if you can cut this.

Aside from income tax, flexible spending is where I spend 50% of my annual spend.

Last year, I spend $25,734 so this is also a reversion back to my 2023 spending.

I contributed $0 to nursing home this year. We got higher subsidies for my grandmother, who is in a nursing home so my aunt told us this is less needed. Still, I think we should eventually plan for a day where we won’t get so much subsidy so I continue to contribute.

Premium meals are the discretionary meals I spend out celebrating events, treating friends and family. If I am doing well, there will be more and if not, this will be more controlled. This amount is not too different from last year. I don’t control my premium meals and this is very volatile but they somehow don’t change much.

I don’t budget a fixed amount for premium meals but just spend them. If I meet or decide to go out more to have a good time, this will increase and vice versa. 2025’s premium meals is not too different from 2024’s.

The fun and hobby spending is lump under Entertainment and Hobbies. This is where my nonsense spending is and this went up like 100% this year. Providend Gifts are the spending that happen accidentally or intentionally because of where I work. This year’s spending is just slightly lower than last year.

You will gain more insight about my flexible spending if you go to my personal notes section and take a glimpse at My Spending Log under How I think about other areas of my current recurring expenses.

I gifted 50% less to people. The amount that I spend at Providend went up by 30%. Gokoku and Baker’s Bench probably amount for a mass majority of that lol.

I spent less on vacation this year as well.

The Rest of My Spending

The rest of my spending includes:

1. Income Tax under Work
2. Insurance Premiums under Funded by Net Wealth

My income tax is a function of work and blog income. If there are inflows, this is a necessary outflow. Don’t have to think about it so much except to have enough liquidity to pay for it.

Despite Investment Moats revenue falling strangely I seem to be paying less.

I have set aside capital to pay for future insurance premiums so that won’t come from the salary. You can read about it at Cutting My F.I. Capital Needs for Insurance Premiums from $131,366 to $58,132 by Prepaying for It.

Insurance premiums are up.

I suspect that I have to account for my hospital and surgical insurance plans better to attribute part of that as what I provision in my Essential Inflexible Spend.

End of the Year Spending Reflection

There ain’t a lot to learn from study how I eat, move about and spend on the things that keep the household going after doing this for the past decade.

While tracking your spending is important, review and reflection is where the value is.

How you frame or group your spending is critical because it simplifies the kind of planning you wish to do.

Not everyone appreciates the nuance part of it but I am glad some of my friends do.

I profiled how a Telegram group member who decide to shift his budgeting grouping in 2024’s review. This year I want to share my friend CentsofIndpendence’s slight shift in framing:

She and I had ongoing conversations about dealing with how she spends her money annually and financial independence planning [Coast FI, and Full FI]. I tend to think that you would try, but stick to a certain framework if you understand it and value it.

In the same spirit, she groups her expenses according to essential expenses that are more fixed and more variable, the discretionary expenses (FUN), and also some expenses that would disappear if life changes (Work), and limited in time (mortgage).

In 2025, she thought about it more

1. how she can feel secure with her income if she decides to replace her tutoring income with something else.
2. thinking about how she can match her mortgage payments, which is a limited time commitment, with the assets she has, but on a cash flow basis.

All this may sound a bit detailed to some of you, but some would also think about these things.

Grouping her expenses based on how essential/inflexible, time-limited/perpetual allows her to better match her assets because she can split her assets into sub-portfolios to plan conservative financing.

You can read more on her Instagram:

There is no right or wrong way to plan or follow.

And maybe you don’t want to bother with it.

However, if you want to have better control over your life and the way money does it, at some point you have to have a mental framework or have someone handle it.

Our budget should reflect our values ​​and the way we want to live our lives. The budget can reflect fear, conservatism or abundance.

How I track and budget my expenses

I use a free and open source, self-hosted, YNAB-style Envelope budgeting system called Actual Budget.

You can read more about it Current budget here.

With a YNAB style envelope system we can see how much money is in an envelope over time. This is something that many other systems struggle to design.

ActualBudget’s reporting has improved by leaps and bounds.

With the help of the reports and the transaction filtering, I was able to come up with this article.

I’ve created a series of YouTube videos from ActualBudget, including how to install and set up your budgeting system.

You can view the playlist here.

But the nice thing about it being free is that there are more and more YouTube videos on Actual Budget. This is great because it creates a bit of a network effect.

Monthly expense item

From mid-2025 I decide to publish my monthly expenses on Investeringsgrachten. You may see a more recent monthly post like this one.

You can see all the weird things I spend money on.

Instagram

I don’t normally publish my monthly issues here, but if you’re interested, I will publish them on my Instagram. If you’re interested, you can check it out.

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Kyith is the owner and sole writer behind Investment Moats. Readers tune in to Investment Moats to learn and build stronger, more solid wealth foundations, how to pursue a passive investing strategy, learn about investing in REITs, and the basics of active investing.

Readers also follow Kyith to learn how to plan well for financial security and financial independence.

Kyith worked as an IT Operations Engineer from 2004 to 2019. He currently works as a Senior Solutions Specialist at Insurance Start-up Havend. All opinions expressed on Investment Moats are his own and do not represent the views of Providend.

You can view Kyith’s current portfolio herewho uses his Free Google Stock Portfolio Tracker.

His favorite investment broker is Interactive real estate agentsallowing him to invest in securities from various stock exchanges around the world, at very low commission rates, without custody fees, near spot currency rates.

You can read more about Kyith here.