In the previous post I wrote about my monthly expenses. This is the continuation of that post and I will be covering my annual expenses in 2025. While monthly expenses are those kind of expenses that occur more frequently, yearly expenses occur rarely, perhaps once every few years like house repairs or buying a new TV etc. I will explain where we are spending the most and why. Remember that for all the expenses, whether monthly or annual, the money is coming out of my retirement corpus which consists of a bunch of debt and equity mutual funds. There are no other incomes or special savings for annual expenses.


Expenses in 2025

Our annual budget for 2025 was Rs. 4.8 lakhs. That budget will remain the same for every year until 2029. Last year we spent around Rs. 2.6 lakhs on these annual expenses. Lets take a look at where we were spending the most.



Our most expensive categories this time were house, entertainment and vehicle related expenses. I will go over each of them and explain why we spend so much.


Starting with the house related expenses. Most of the expense is basically property tax. But other than that, we have a small portion of the Kaveri water connection expense. In the layout that we reside, we don’t have any municipal water connection because we are in the outskirts of the city. Last year finally we got some water pipeline connection done up to our layout. Instead of each home owner applying for individual water connection, our association decided that we will approach a vendor and get them to work on our applications and get the water connection to all the houses together. So we have to pay the vendor “processing fees” (read bribes), to get our water connection application started. That is the expense. Rest are all small sundry expenses like tank cleaning, replacing lights, minor civil works etc.


Our entertainment expense was high because like I mentioned in one of my previous posts, our 9 year old TV failed and we needed a replacement. I have always wanted an OLED TV so my eye was on 55” LG A3 OLED TV. After my old TV failed in late 2024, I kept watching the price of the TV and after a couple of months or so later, the price fell to an all time low during some sale in Jan 2025. I purchased it for 80K at that time. Other than that there were other small expenses like dual HDD hub, HDMI 2.1 cable and some parts for my old failed TV in the hopes of fixing it (but I could not fix it).


Finally, vehicle related expenses are because we decided to sell our 15 years old two wheeler and replace it with an electric one. We could have renewed the registration for another 5 years, but decided to go for a new one instead. I explained my reasons in a previous post. The cost of electric scooter came to Rs. 90,000 including RTO, insurance etc and we sold our old scooter for Rs. 14,000. More details in a previous post.



Other than those major expenses, the rest of the annual expenses were small. The other room expenses include a new mattress. Kitchen expenses include the usual water filter change, some repairs for our washing machine, purchase of utensils etc. Projects related expenses were this blog domain renewal, a bunch of electronics to upgrade my home automation, and a solar panel for Rs. 7000 which I needed.


The only other big expense is in miscellaneous category which is basically things I bought or gifted to parents / friends / relatives. Other than those, rest of the expenses are too small even to write about.


Cumulative annual expenses

Annual expenses are a little different from monthly expenses in that I keep adding up all the expenses over the years since retirement. Any budget left over from the previous year will be carried over to the new year. I do this because some expenses happen only once every 10 years or so like buying a car. The budget keeps getting accumulated until I buy the car. Here are my cumulative expenses until end of 2025.



When I moved to Actual Budget for recording all my expenses (from my earlier spreadsheet method), I found a few bugs in my old data and fixed all of them. As a result, some of the numbers you see in the above table may be different from the data from my earlier “year in review” series. Since retirement in 2018, we have spent about Rs. 20L till date on annual expenses related categories. Now lets look at what is left over in each budget categories.



Right now, I am over budget only in “Self Improvement” expenses. That happened because I purchased gym equipment right around when I retired, but recorded it in the wrong category. So it never showed up as being over budget. Otherwise all other categories are within the budget and we have about Rs. 14L leftover.


Budget for 2026

I increase my annual budget only once in 5 years. The previous budget of Rs. 4.8L per annum is for the five year period between 2025 and 2029. Here is how I am spreading the annual budget into different categories.



Total Expenses in 2026

We spent around Rs. 8.65L in total, including annual and monthly expenses from our retirement corpus in 2025. That comes out to Rs. 72K per month on average.