Monthly Spending Report: March 2015

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?