Income and Expenses, Savings Rate for Q4 and full year 2017

A year has once again changed, and january is remain only a few days. Time goes really fast and I feel that I don't have time to do anything, what I had planned. In any case, now it is once again time to take a closer look how I managed I in 2017 and how my journey towards financial independence is developing. During the year 2017, I grow my portfolio very strongly and got pretty close to my goal in dividend income, also it seems that my expenses have decreased a little bit comparing to the last year. Since this is the third year when I keep a stricter control of my spending, I  made a comparison with last year's results. As I mentioned in my first income / expenditure report, I will make a summary on a quarterly basis, because my months in the case of income are very different. This will give me a better view of the overall situation and hopefully will inspire some of my blog readers.

Here are my numbers for Q4:

All revenues are reported net of taxes.

In the fourth quarter of my salary income were nearly normal. Expenditures also fell sharply compared to the previous quarter.

My goal is to save about half of my wage income and invest those wisely. In the fourth quarter I clearly missed my target, my saving rate of wage income was 40.59%. When I take into account also the dividend income, my savings rate rises to 56.66%.

One thing that I will follow with great interest is the dividend income and expenditure ratio, because it is the most important thing on my way towards to the financial independence.

The fourth quarter went much better as a third one. This time dividend income covered about 62% of my expenses. Better achievement is of course due to lower expenditure and it is a really good thing after that bad third quarter.

Let's see what the result was for the whole year:

My expenses were an average of 1714 Euros and my salary was an average 2655 Euros per month. As you can see, during the year I managed to save only 35.45% of my wage income, so I again clearly missed my goal, which is 50%. Of the total income my savings rate in 2017 was 52.22%.

Last year, my dividend income covered 54.35 per cent of my expenses.  

Comparison between 2016 and 2017:

2017 my dividend income increased by about 9.6 per cent, mainly because I made several acquisitions during the year. Wage income compared to last year were a little bit lower, for the simple reason that I did less overtime work. Although my spending slightly decreased, I was saving less on my salary, as my wage income also declined compared to 2016. Dividend income covered about 54 percent of my spending, which was about 13 percent more than the year before, so the journey towards financial independence seems to have come a little bit closer.

Although the journey is still long, I feel confident about the future. I try to keep my expenses at a reasonable level, to increase my portfolio with good share purchases and in this way to get closer to my goal.

Thanks for stopping by!

Photo Credit: Stuart Miles/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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