I’m going to do a series of monthly spending reports, wherein (as one might guess) I will be exposing the nitty gritty details of my monthly budget. I want to do this for several reasons. One, to outline that not spending much isn’t terribly difficult, and two, to help you all hold me accountable to my promises. How am I supposed to talk the talk if I can’t walk the walk?
Without any further ado here is my spending for this month:
As you can see, there are several categories of note:
1) Automotive is low due to the cost of gas dropping, and me staying relatively close to home during the month.
2) Internet dropped from $130 to $70 when I dropped cable. I wish I could get it lower, but Mediacom refuses to budge.
3) Utilities were a bit high this month. Not much I can do about that with a roommate. At least the weather is warming up!
4) Groceries came in well under budget since I didn’t get a CSA share this month.
5) Restaurants. OUCH. I spent way too much money eating out this month. Part of it was being on a trip for the AF, and part of it was being lazy. Alcohol is included in this category.
6) Auto Insurance was due this month. Not much I can do about that until I turn 25/have a few tickets drop off my record :/
7) Lots of misc expenses and shopping due to the AF trip. Don’t fret, I was reimbursed for most of it.
8) I bought a new phone. I had excess income due to the AF trip and tax refunds, so now is a good time. It should last me another 2 years.
9) I put the down payment on my trip to Ecuador in October this month. The next few months will have payments on the trip and plane tickets (more on that soon!)
All in all, a fairly decent month. Most of my bills were under or on budget and I didn’t get too crazy with random shopping excursions. I also managed to put away $1800 in my 401(k), $50 in my HSA and $450 in my Roth IRA. ALthough, to be fair, a good chunk of the 401(k) money is from my employer match. I’ll go deeper on that in a post soon.
How did you do on spending this month?
Do you have any great programs/expense tracking tools? I have a mental budget most months (also I’m a saver by habit, so that helps) but always struggle to keep an ACTUAL budget because I don’t know how best to track everything.
I have several methods that I hodgepodge together. I use Mint to capture all my day to day spending and budgeting, Excel because who doesn’t love a good spreadsheet, and Personal Capital for tracking my investments in better detail.
http://www.mint.com
http://www.personalcapital.com