Household Finances

Where the card's $126,160 actually goes

Computed by parsing every transaction line from all 12 PDFs and matching merchant names against ~200 keyword rules — not a manual estimate. Cafes and pubs/restaurants are split into two slices, not combined into one "dining out" figure — they're different behaviours (a daily habit vs. discretionary meals out). "Other" is 8 small categories folded together (home & household, donations, personal care, alcohol, a Ballarat-region property charge, Shane's business expenses, card fees, and the unmatched long tail) so the chart stays readable — see the full table below for every category split out.

The lifestyle cost of eating well

Groceries split into "everyday" (Woolworths, Coles, McCoppinsch) and "organic/quality" (Clay Health & Organics, Wild Things Food, Senserrick green grocer, the local butcher, market stalls) — alcohol pulled out into its own category entirely, so it's not inflating either grocery number. This makes the actual food-quality premium visible instead of burying it inside one combined number.

Nearly 59% of the grocery budget goes to organic/quality grocers rather than the two mainstream supermarkets, and that's now a clean number with alcohol AND fuel (Coles Express is a servo, not a grocery run — moved to Transport) both stripped out. If every one of those trips became a Woolworths/Coles trip instead, groceries would run closer to $700/month total, not $1,651. The gap (~$972/month, ~$11,665/year) is the actual, isolated cost of eating this way.

Full category breakdown — every category, not just the top 8

Click any category to jump straight to its full merchant-by-merchant breakdown.

"Cafes & bakeries" now means Amann Patisserie, Florian, and genuine coffee/bakery stops only — Clay Health & Organics, Wild Things Food, Senserrick (a green grocer), and Sunbakers (a bakery in Ocean Grove) all moved to groceries/cafes where they belong, and McCoppinsch (a supermarket) moved to everyday groceries. Retail alcohol (Dan Murphy's, Rathdowne Cellars, BWS, Liquorland, Blackhearts & Spar) is its own category now, separated out of groceries. Aust Physio Association membership and Adobe moved into Business expenses — professional/business costs, not personal health or streaming. "Utilities & telco" now includes GWW (Greater Western Water) — 4 water bills, $804.38, previously sitting unmatched. "Property (Ballarat/regional)" is 4 quarterly water-rate charges from "Central Highlands Re" (Wendouree), confirmed — a different water authority, for the regional property specifically. "Coles Express" (a servo, not a supermarket) and one "United" fuel stop in Heathcote both moved from groceries/unmatched into Transport & auto, where fuel actually belongs. L9 Unlimited ($1,872, weekly) is Shane's gym, not a kids' activity — moved to Health. The Littleoak Company ($1,627.44) is baby formula, not a kids' activity or programme — stays filed under Kids & family since it's still a baby-need cost, just relabelled correctly. Terra Madre ($454.88, a health food store) moved from Pubs into organic groceries; Muscrats ($325.85, a gift store) and Assembly Smith Street ($320.00, clothing) both moved from Pubs into Shopping & retail — none of the three are dining spend. The unmatched long tail is mostly small holiday-town merchants (Ocean Grove, Barwon Heads, Torquay, Point Lonsdale, Heathcote) — food and incidentals while travelling that didn't cleanly match a keyword rule.

Merchants over $2,000 for the year

Only 10 individual merchants cross $2,000 across all 2,100 transactions — everything else is spread thin. Click through to see each one in its category context.

Together these 10 merchants account for $34,819.74 — 27.6% of all card spend — across just 628 of the 2,100 transactions.

Car costs — the whole picture, for the 1-vs-2-car decision

Car spend is scattered across three different categories above (Insurance, Council/rego, Transport & auto) — on its own, "Insurance" is misleading, because the real decision isn't insurance, it's whether the second car earns its keep. Pulled together here, correctly attributed: you've confirmed the generic mechanic/parts/fuel/parking spend that looked "shared" is all the Subaru's — it does the daily running around, the Toyota's costs are the named, occasional ones.

Running two cars costs ~$9,656/year (~$805/month) all-in, split almost evenly — Toyota $4,660/year (~$388/month), Subaru $4,996/year (~$416/month). This is a materially bigger number for the Subaru than the earlier "$2,046, insignificant" read — that figure only counted insurance and half the rego; once all the mechanic, fuel, and parking spend is correctly attributed, the Subaru is actually running the household nearly as much as the Toyota does, not a cheap second car. Worth re-weighing against the 1-vs-2-car decision on that basis. Bikes (Bicycles, Velo Cycles, 99 Bikes — $795.54) and rideshare/taxis (Uber Trip, Taxipay — $423.22) are still excluded; different transport mode, not car-running costs.

Vehicle transition — corrected sequencing

Correction from last pass: the business-EV swap should target the Toyota, not the Subaru. The Subaru isn't the small, easily-replaced car — it's doing the "shove everything in, get away, go long distance" job right now. A mid-size EV (even the shortlist below) doesn't fully replicate that: real regional/rural Australia still has genuine charging-availability gaps a diesel wagon doesn't, and cargo/touring practicality for 3 kids + gear is a real question a compact-to-mid SUV EV can't confidently answer yet. Selling the Subaru first, before the Carnival exists, would leave a real capability gap, not just an inconvenience. The Toyota, by elimination, is the everyday/commuter car — exactly the use case a smaller EV is genuinely good at, with no capability lost.

End state is really 3 vehicles, not 2: the Carnival (personal, road trips), the e-bike (personal, local), and the ex-Toyota business EV (a business asset, still physically a car in the driveway, but off the household ledger) — "1 car + 1 e-bike" means one personal car, not literally one vehicle total. Step 1 still has a clean, immediate, quantified number and doesn't require the Carnival decision to be settled — do that first. Step 3 only happens once the Carnival's actually ready, not before, so the Subaru's road-trip job is never left uncovered.

The capital check this plan hasn't had yet: all-in, this is roughly $90–105k of capital after resale recovery (business EV, Carnival, $15k e-bike) — deployed to shift/save ~$9.7k/yr of running costs. Against a $300k offset that's already funding a $29–39k/yr structural gap (see the full household picture panel), that's a third of the buffer. Two things follow. First, "off the household ledger" isn't "gone" — it's the same wallet at a tax discount, and the FBT-exemption framing only exists if the business structure supports an employment relationship (company/trust paying Shane as employee/director) — sole-trader arrangements have no FBT at all, so verify the structure fits before the plan hardens. Second, an owned, paid-off Toyota is an option — sellable in a bad month — while a lease is a fixed multi-year obligation that lands hardest in exactly the scenario the break-glass panel models. Sequencing rule worth adopting: no vehicle capital deployed until the structural gap is closed, or at minimum a hard floor set on the offset (e.g. never below ~$150k ≈ 2.5 years of break-glass runway). The tax saving is real; it just shouldn't jump the queue ahead of the deficit.

Toyota-replacement shortlist — 3 car seats across, weekend-trip range, under the LCT threshold

This is the Step 1 vehicle — a mid-size EV for daily commuting that can still comfortably cover an occasional weekend away, fits 3 car seats across the back row, and sits under the $92,494 fuel-efficient LCT threshold. It is not being asked to replace the Subaru's long-distance touring role — that stays with the Subaru until the Carnival arrives. Three real current options came up:

Not on this list: the Kia EV9 — genuine 3rd-row, most spacious option, but it's a larger 7-seat SUV and its pricing runs close to or over the LCT threshold depending on trim, which works against the FBT-exemption structure this plan depends on. That's closer to a Carnival-alternative than a Toyota-replacement. Exact drive-away pricing moves; confirm current numbers against the $92,494 threshold before committing, and loop Paul Foley in given the FBT wind-back above.

Already decided, not hypothetical

Distinct from the break-glass scenario below — these are real, near-term calls, not an emergency-only list.

The full household picture — income in, money out

Everything above this panel was card-only. Adding what the card never sees — $70k rent, $10k childcare, $5k cash cleaning, and the income side — changes the conclusion more than any category correction did. Rent alone is 3× bigger than the largest card category.

Two readings of the same numbers. The reassuring one: even in a full income-stop with cuts, the household has ~5 years of runway — that's a genuinely strong position, and nothing here is an emergency. The uncomfortable one: the household lives ~25% above its income and the offset pays the gap — every status-quo year costs ~$40–50k of buffer. The strategic question isn't whether to close the gap, it's whether the FY27 drawdown is a deliberate, time-boxed investment year (see the FY27→FY28 plan below) or an open-ended default. Tax figures are rough estimates at 2026–27 resident rates — Paul has the real numbers.

FY27 → FY28: a planned drawdown year, and what the plan leans on

The working thesis: FY27 runs at a known loss (~$40–50k — baby year, business build year), then FY28 closes the gap via business growth (+50%, $120k → $180k) and Hannah returning to full-time work. Pressure-tested with rough tax and childcare assumptions, the thesis holds — but it holds on one leg more than the other.

The load-bearing assumption is the business +50%, not Hannah's return. Her going full-time is partially self-offsetting — more income, but more childcare at a lower subsidy rate — so it roughly halves the gap on its own rather than closing it. Two guardrails make this a plan instead of a hope: (1) a mid-year checkpoint — if by Dec 2026 revenue isn't tracking toward the +50%, the top of the break-glass list gets pulled then, not at the end of FY27 after another $25k of drawdown; (2) the offset floor from the vehicle panel (~$150k) holds regardless. Worth noting the FY27 forecast bias question is now settled too: the $7.5k caravan fee IS the holiday line — it's a prepaid, fixed holiday cost sitting off-card, which both explains the Ocean Grove/Barwon Heads spend in the unmatched long tail and means holidays are structurally cheap from here (the marginal cost of a caravan trip is fuel and food, not flights and accommodation).

Where the real leverage is

Low-hanging fruit — one decision vs. a thousand small ones

Fair read: this is an expensive lifestyle. But not everything expensive is a lever — the size of a category and how easy it is to actually move are two different things. Cafes is the trap: $13,032/year sounds like a lot, but it's 688 separate $10–20 impulse decisions, which is one of the hardest ways to change spending that exists. The real 10%+ moves are sitting in things you decide once, not things you resist daily.

Stack the first three (holiday, insurance/utilities re-shop, Wild Things frequency) and you're looking at roughly $15,100–$16,200/year (12–13% of total spend) from three decisions and zero daily discipline — already over the 10% bar without touching a single coffee, an activity subscription, or the gym.

H2 2025 → H1 2026: what the ~$33k drop actually is

H2 2025 (Jul–Dec): $72,540. H1 2026 (Jan–Jun): $39,587. That's a genuinely large drop, and it's tempting to read it as "we've gotten more careful" — but most of it has a specific, findable cause that has nothing to do with day-to-day discipline.

Add it up and the identifiable, non-behavioural drivers (holiday timing + business + baby setup + one-offs) account for roughly $19,200 of the ~$33,000 half-year gap. The rest is a mix of genuine softening and normal month-to-month noise in smaller categories. Bottom line: the household hasn't fundamentally changed how it spends — the calendar changed.

FY27 forecast (Jul 2026 – Jun 2027)

Built from the trailing 12 months ($126,160), with every one-off identified above stripped out and not assumed to repeat. Everything else — groceries, dining, subscriptions, insurance, utilities, kids' ongoing activities — held flat at the current run rate, since none of it shows a real trend either way.

Range, not a point estimate: cafes + pubs/restaurants combined is the biggest source of forecast uncertainty — the full-12-month average runs ~$20,700/yr, but H1 2026 annualises to only ~$16,200/yr (pubs/restaurants alone is down 27% and still falling — see the trend chart above). Held flat here at the full-year average (conservative); if the quieter H1 pace holds, FY27 could land closer to ~$93,600. Two things aren't in this base case at all: a holiday (add back ~$8,000–13,000 if one gets booked — that's the single biggest lever in the whole forecast, see above), and the Toyota moving to a business EV (subtract a further ~$4,660 — see the Car costs and Vehicle transition panels above; the Subaru stays on the household books for now, since it's still doing the family's long-distance road-trip job until the Carnival is ready). Everything else — the ~$19,800 grocery split, the recurring-costs floor, insurance, utilities — is the steady, unglamorous base that doesn't move much either way.

Break-glass scenario — if the income stops tomorrow

Starting from the FY27 base case (~$98,140/year, business already excluded) — not the bigger FY26 actual, since that still had one-off holiday and baby-setup spend baked in that was never going to repeat anyway. Every cut below is a real, ranked decision — biggest structural moves first, then the habitual spend, ending with the values-based cuts that should be the last resort, not the first.

The floor: ~$48,012/year (~$4,001/month) — a 51% cut from the FY27 base case, 60% below the trailing FY26 household total. What's left at the floor: everyday groceries ($8,149), HBF + real medical care (~$10,919), Littleoak formula + small kids' costs (~$4,323), Toyota's insurance + running costs (~$4,943), utilities including water (~$4,749), council rates + remaining rego (~$2,307), home essentials (~$842), a small shopping allowance (~$2,044), Proton (~$195), card fees (~$299), and a genuine unmatched-spend buffer (~$3,389) — plus a small cafes/pubs/travel float (~$4,400) kept deliberately, not zeroed, because going to true $0 on every discretionary line isn't sustainable and tends to fail within weeks. This is a real, livable floor, not a fantasy number — but it is a 51% cut, and it would be felt everywhere, not just in the categories that got cut to zero. And it's a card floor, not a household floor: add rent ($70k) and childcare ($10k — kept, since it's what lets Hannah keep working) and the true break-glass floor is ~$128k/year. Against Hannah's continuing net income (~$50k) plus the rental income (~$19k net), that's a net burn of ~$59k/year — which the $300k offset covers for ~5 years. That runway number is the actual answer to "how bad is break-glass" — see the full household picture panel above.

What's on the table for Paul Foley — sizes, not tax advice

This dashboard can size up what's being spent — it can't tell you what's legitimately deductible, FBT-exempt, or trust-payable. That's a real conversation with Paul, not a spreadsheet call. Here's the clean dollar size of everything raised, so that conversation starts with numbers instead of a vague sense of it.

None of this is advice on what you can actually claim — it's the dollar figures so the conversation with Paul starts informed. He has the context on your business structure (sole trader, company, trust) that determines what's actually available; this dashboard doesn't and shouldn't guess at it.

What's actually on repeat (from the 12 fully-itemised orders)

Exact frequency counts across all 12 invoiced orders — how many of the 12 each item appears in.

Nappies, corrected

Show up in exactly 6 of 12 orders, not every one. Sizing isn't a clean progression either — Size 3 (21 Jan) → Size 4 (Feb–Apr), then Sizes 4, 5 and 6 all get ordered within the same six-week window (13 Apr–7 Jun), which reads as buying ahead / working through mixed stock rather than a tidy size-up. Current size as of late June: Size 5.

Woolworths order-by-order (12 fully itemised)

Plus 17 more orders (~$2,935 total) between 12 Jul 2025 and 12 Jan 2026 found on the card but not itemisable — the website won't surface them and no invoice PDFs exist for them yet.

Spend per statement cycle

Oct 2025 is the outlier — a Bali trip (Komune Hotel, flights, Airbnb) pushed that cycle to ~$18k. All 12 bars are the actual parsed purchase totals for that cycle, verified against the statements' own numbers (see accuracy note above) — none of these are estimates.

Notable one-off purchases

The Bradley Miranda Susan double-charge (identical amount, same merchant, same day) is worth a second look — could be legitimate (two sessions) or a duplicate.

Trend check — has dining spend actually dropped?

Split by behaviour, not combined — cafes (daily habit) and pubs/restaurants (discretionary meals out) move differently and a combined chart hid that.

Cafes & bakeries — remarkably flat all year, no real trend. This is the daily-habit spend (Florian, Amann, the rest) and it stays in a tight $694–$1,288/month band regardless of month or season.

$1,086/month average. First-3-months average ($1,182/mo) vs. last-3-full-months average ($1,076/mo) is a ~9% dip — real, but small, and nothing like "we've cut this out."

Pubs, bars & restaurants — much more volatile, one clear outlier, and a real trend down that's steeper than it first looked once Terra Madre (a health food store), Muscrats (a gift store), and Assembly Smith Street (clothing) were corrected out of this category.

$635/month average, but Dec 2025 (holiday season) is a genuine outlier at more than double every other month — excluding it, the average drops to $546/month. First-3-months average ($690/mo) vs. last-3-full-months average ($504/mo) is down ~27% — clearly the more real of the two "we're cutting back" signals, and steeper than the earlier read once the gift-store/clothing/health-food miscategorisations were fixed.

Together: if the goal is genuinely to cut dining spend, pubs/restaurants is the category actually showing real give — down 27% and still falling — while cafes basically isn't moving. Target a real number for whichever one matters (e.g. an $800/month cap on pubs & restaurants) rather than treating "dining out" as one lever, because it behaves as two.

Amann & Florian, specifically — has attendance dropped since the birth (22 Aug 2025)?

Hannah's read: heavy spend at these two in the months before the birth, especially Amann, and "sitting in" at Florian for proper meals. Checked first-3-months (Jun–Aug 2025, which is also the pre-birth window, since the data starts 5 Jun 2025) against the last 3 full months (Mar–May 2026) — and it splits in two different directions depending on which venue.

Explained: it's geography, not discipline. Florian is near daycare — the old routine. Amann is near the school drop-off, which now drags until ~9am, so it's become the waiting-around stop on the way. Florian is genuinely down — fewer visits (−24%) and each one cheaper (−40%), consistent with less "sitting in" for a proper meal, exactly what Hannah flagged. Amann is actually up — visits have more than doubled (27 → 66 over the same 3-month window) — not because the habit got worse, but because the school-drop-off routine now puts him there most mornings. Combined dollars are down 26% (Hannah's instinct about the total direction is right), but it's really two routine changes overlapping, not a spending-discipline story at all. Impact: because it's tied to an unavoidable daily school-run wait rather than a discretionary habit, Amann is genuinely harder to cut than Florian was — it's not "resist the coffee," it's "the drop-off takes 45 minutes and there's a cafe right there." If the break-glass cafes cut above ($150/month) is ever needed for real, this is the specific habit that will be hardest to shift, and the fix probably isn't willpower — it's a different waiting spot, or timing the drop-off differently.

Still recurring today ACTIVE

Active recurring floor: ~$19,700/year (~$1,642/month) — before any groceries, cafes, one-off kids spend, or discretionary purchases. Kayo/Hubbl and Plan Australia both went up slightly from the previous cut once billing-descriptor variants (Streamotion, and a stray "Plan International Aus" charge) got reconciled into the same line rather than sitting as separate, undercounted entries.

Stopped — no longer charging CONCLUDED

Adobe has been removed from this table — it's Shane's business software, not a household subscription, so it now lives in Business expenses (see the Overview category table). The $237.54 refund event noted below still happened, it's just no longer filed as a personal cost. Disney+ isn't in either table — it never appeared as its own line item on this card in the last 12 months (see note in the Qantas Card section above). Nothing here contradicts having cancelled it.

Budget read

This is one card only — the known off-card spend is now quantified: $70k rent, $10k childcare, $7.5k caravan annual fee, and $5k cash cleaning (~$92.5k/yr, none of it visible here), plus the Allianz home insurance policy, which doesn't appear on this card either. See "The full household picture" in the Decisions tab for the complete income-and-spend view.