Monthly Status Report: April 2016

Why do I do a monthly status report?

I find it best to do a month­ly sta­tus report for a few reasons.

• It helps me eval­u­ate how I did the pre­vi­ous month. Did I hit a tar­get reduc­tion in spend­ing or did I go way over bud­get for a par­tic­u­lar cat­e­gory? Did I earn more? What was my over­all sav­ings rate?
• It helps keep me account­able. How can I make an extra pur­chase know­ing I’ll have to explain myself to all of you? Talk about awk­ward when the blog­ger can’t walk the walk and talk the talk.
• I want to prove this crazy thing called finan­cial inde­pen­dence works!
• It pro­vides an exam­ple of real world bud­get­ing and expens­es. Some of the peo­ple I talk to haven’t ever seen a prop­er bud­get or seen one put into action, and part of the pur­pose of this blog is to lead by example!

I use Mint to help me track my spend­ing and keep an eye on my accounts. I also use a real­ly awe­some and super in-depth spread­sheet. So many for­mu­las….. Some peo­ple use Per­sonal Cap­i­tal and oth­ers use You Need a Bud­get (YNAB). What­ever tool (or com­bi­na­tion there­of) works best for you and your needs is the best one for you, since every­one and their bud­gets are different.

Spending:

April was simul­ta­ne­ous­ly the longest month of my life, and also seemed to go by in the blink of an eye. I man­aged to pack in a lot of fun things last month! It felt like it took for­ev­er because I was look­ing for­ward to the last week­end so much, but when I look back things actu­al­ly went by incred­i­bly quickly.

I par­tic­i­pat­ed in a kick­ball tour­na­ment at the begin­ning of the month that was super fun, but also super tir­ing. All of my var­i­ous sports start­ed up in April as well, so I was busy run­ning (lit­er­al­ly) between soc­cer and soft­ball games. For­tu­nate­ly, besides an alco­holic bev­er­age here and there, I don’t have to pay any mon­ey beyond what I already paid out. 

Speak­ing of alco­holic bev­er­ages, I did a mini road­trip to my home­town to par­tic­i­pate in a beer tast­ing with my par­ents. It’s our 3^rd year in a row, and my par­en­t’s 15^th year in a row going to this, so it’s kind of a big deal in our fam­i­ly. It was lots of fun and I got to taste a mul­ti­tude of deli­cious drinks!

One free thing I did this month was cel­e­brate my cat’s first birth­day! Yes, I’m one of those cat own­ers. At the ripe old age of one, my fluff­ball weighs in at 13 lbs with some more to grow. He’s a big snug­gler and well worth the mon­ey I’ve spent on tak­ing care of him.

Between all the elec­tion results com­ing in, my video games, tv shows and MLB games on TV, there was very lit­tle need for me to go out most of the month which def­i­nite­ly helped keep my expens­es down. I did go out one night to have din­ner with Mr. 1500 and a read­er of his, which made for a very enjoy­able evening!

Just because we could, I also met up with him, his love­ly wife Mrs. 1500, the PoP’s, Bryan from Income Surfers, the Even Stevens, and Steve from Steveo­nom­ics (along with sev­er­al forum mem­bers from the MMM forum!) in Oma­ha this last week­end at the Berk­shire Hath­away Annu­al Investor’s Meet­ing. Thanks to the PoP’s giv­ing me their extra tick­et, I was able to attend the meet­ing itself. As some­one who only knows the vaguest of details about Berk­shire, I found my atten­tion fluc­tu­at­ed through­out the day, although some parts were def­i­nite­ly inter­est­ing. Over­all, I’m very glad I got to go and expe­ri­ence it at least once, although I can’t guar­an­tee I’d want to attend next year.

The best part was get­ting to meet my fel­low FI blog­gers and the con­ver­sa­tions we had. (Final­ly get­ting to meet in the case of the Even Stevens. There’s no escap­ing it!) I now have faces, names and back­ground info to put with the sto­ries on their blogs, which makes things more real for me. I look for­ward to get­ting to see them at var­i­ous events through the rest of the year and con­tin­u­ing to get to know them better.

But I’ve segued far enough from the num­bers. With­out fur­ther ado, I present my spend­ing (for bet­ter or for worse) for April 2016.

Rent	Stil­l­l­ll pay­ing rent.
Util­i­ties	Util­ties went down again this month!
Food	SO far over over I don’t even know where to start. 100% worth it though.
Phone	So low. I love Project FI!
Auto	I did more dri­ving this month with 3 road­trips. I also had to get some work done on my car.
Inter­net	Same price as always.
Insur­ance	Health insur­ance is paid direct­ly from my pay­check, and the oth­ers are an aver­age from my 6 month payment.
Pet	Just some more wet food and lit­ter for the furball.
Sup­port	I’ve start­ed sup­port­ing both of my sis­ters in var­i­ous ways.
Misc	New con­tacts for the year, some spend­ing on sup­plies for my hob­bies and oth­er ran­dom stuff.
Trav­el	Woah nel­ly. So much mon­ey spent on trav­el this month. Plane tick­ets for Nashville, St Louis, and my trip to Lon­don; tick­ets for Car­di­nals games; and my AirBnb for Omaha.
Shop­ping	Bought some stuff on Ama­zon and a fid­dle toy to help calm my hands.
Fees	Most of this is tax­es paid to the gov­ern­ment for 2015. Blah.
Gifts	My nor­mal month­ly con­tri­bu­tion to a polit­i­cal candidate.

 

All told, my spend­ing totaled $4160.42 for April. April was not only as bad as I thought it would be, it was worse. I found sev­er­al good deals that I could NOT pass up. There’s no rea­son to not buy some­thing I need for lat­er because the bud­get is shot when it will just cost me more down the road. Case in point: $467 roundtrip tick­et from Chica­go to Lon­don. That’s a REALLY good deal and not some­thing to pass up because I’ve already spent $800 on trav­el this month.

If you take out the $1291 in trav­el, I only spent $2869 which is pret­ty decent. So, even though this was a high spend­ing month, I’m not unhap­py with the results.

Income

Gross: $7079

Adjust­ed: $2,966.82

Tax­es: $1,180.32

Thank good­ness my tax return from both states and the feds arrived this month. The extra $1269 real­ly helped off­set all the spend­ing I did on trav­el. In fact, it almost exact­ly equaled my trav­el spend­ing! Weird.

Savings

401k: $2,091.60

Roth IRA: $450

HSA: $100.00

Total sav­ings: $2,641.60

I wish I had been able to save a bit more out­side my retire­ment accounts, but one month won’t derail my plans.

As of April 30^th, my net worth sits at $92,444.25 I’m real­ly hop­ing I can hit $100k by the end of June.

Accord­ing to the Lab over on Mad Fien­tist’s site, my FI date is now 9 years and 5 months away. I shaved one month off my time­line, so no extra time was lost this month. Not sur­pris­ing since my sav­ings rate was only 36%.

 

Thanks for read­ing! What did your month look like? Did you stick to your budget?

 

Dis­claimer: this post con­tains affil­i­ate links. They help off­set the costs of bring­ing you new and excit­ing content!