Saturday, August 02, 2014

Monthly Spending

The graph shows our monthly spending each month since moving to Australia. I've taken out some business related expenditures that get refunded - so this is the same as the core expenditure I report in my monthly reports. You can see that the first year we were frugal and expenditure stuck around or just under the $A4,000 per month level. After that there are lots of spikes associated with travel and other larger expenditures and gradually the average has moved up to about $A6,000 a month currently. Note that $A2,150 a month is our rent. All the numbers are nominal, not adjusted for inflation.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Did you give up on trading entirely? If so, why?

mOOm said...

I do a little trading of listed investment funds when they are a lot above or below net tangible assets but otherwise just follow a diversified portfolio investment strategy. Trading takes a lot of time and I found that my psychology is not well suited to just following the rules when I tried to do it full time. So, I ended up losing money. I decided that it was going to be more profitable to make a return to my academic career. If you look at my net worth trajectory that worked out well.

Unknown said...

It indeed did. Congratulations on that. I hope you are happy with your choice too.
Speaking of net-worth trajectories, do you entertain any risk-limiting methods to limit potential downside on your assets? I'm thinking about things like moving average signals such as promoted by Faber (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=962461) or something similar.

mOOm said...

Mostly just diversification and rebalancing to maintain a constant overall beta. If share prices got really high in terms of PEs then we would likely reduce leverage further.

mOOm said...

PS, I am an investor in Faber's fund.