Monthly Status Report: April 2020

Dis­claimer: some links may be affil­i­ate links. They help off­set the cost of keep­ing this blog running!

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 a com­bi­na­tion there­of) works best for you and your needs is the best one for you, since every­one and their bud­gets are different.

Spending

We made it through April! Every­one give them­selves a pat on the back for pow­er­ing through. Weird­ly enough, April seemed to take about half the time that March did. It just proves time is a social construct!

April was notable sim­ply because of the com­plete and utter lack of doing any­thing. Sure I had a few Zoom chats with peo­ple, record­ed a few pod­cast episodes with friends, and did long-dis­tance dat­ing activ­i­ties like watch­ing movies and shows with my boyfriend — but in the grand scheme of things it was­n’t much. My car got moved once a week to go pick up my CSA share and I bare­ly left the house to do any­thing else. (Except the very begin­ning of the month when I com­plete­ly dis­obeyed all stay at home orders to help my friend move to a dif­fer­ent state. It would not have been pos­si­ble with­out me and she need­ed to start her new job as soon as pos­si­ble! The whole expe­ri­ence was awful and I’m going to spring for movers next time.)

That being said, I don’t feel like my bud­get has changed much. Check it out for yourself!

 

Hous­ing	The usu­al LCOL rent payment
Util­i­ties	This month includes two months worth of gas bills which is why it seems high
Food	Food went down slight­ly from the peak of last month.
Phone	I love Google FI! Now with a new unlim­it­ed plan (and pay­ing off my phone)
Auto	A few tanks of gas and auto insur­ance payment
Inter­net	Got­ta have that fast inter­web access
Pet	No need for pet expens­es after stock­ing up
Blog	Nor­mal expenses!
Enter­tain­ment	Stream­ing sub­scrip­tions (YT Music, Mario Kart, Netflix)
Shop­ping	A few things to make shel­ter­ing in place easier
Gifts	Dona­tions to local char­i­ties, friends, and my home church (and sup­port for my sister)
Hob­bies	I bought a gen­tly used DSLR and some lens­es! So excit­ed to get back into photography
Health	Ther­a­py! Yay! Also it’s real­ly hard to find Tylenol nowadays

Turns out my expens­es for April were much high­er than I thought they’d be, giv­en that I bare­ly left the house. Total spend­ing was $4,816. I am proud it’s this high, as a sol­id chunk of it came from giv­ing away my stim­u­lus mon­ey. I thought there could be more peo­ple who need­ed the mon­ey than I did, so I gave mon­ey to my home church, a few local St Louis char­i­ties, and some friends who were wait­ing on their unem­ploy­ment checks. I also chose this month to start sup­port­ing my sis­ter like I was doing a few years ago.

I’m also restart­ing my pho­tog­ra­phy hob­by. I love tak­ing pho­tos and want to fur­ther my skills (picked up in 2 high school pho­tog­ra­phy class­es which were infi­nite­ly more use­ful than band). How­ev­er, you can only get so far with a phone cam­era, so I bought my friend’s used Canon Rebel T2i DSLR and a few lens­es. This will be some­thing I want to make sure I use before I splurge on a new­er cam­era body and nicer lens­es. Gear isn’t cheap, even used, so that’s an extra ~$700 addi­tion­al expense I was­n’t antic­i­pat­ing. How­ev­er, I’ve now spent hours lost in the world of pho­tog­ra­phy, so I’d say it’s well spent.

Income

Pay­checks: $6,333.34
Oth­er income: $1,228.44

Total: $7,561.78

My month­ly pay went back down to nor­mal. Sad. How­ev­er, I did get the full stim­u­lus check (thanks to not fil­ing my 2019 tax­es yet. Pro­cras­ti­na­tion pays off! If I have to pay any­thing back because I earned over $75,000 in 2019, it will be min­i­mal.) I also got reim­bursed for a pay­ment I made on my cred­it card. Yay rewards.

Savings

401k: $1,076.68
Roth: $0
Unal­lo­cat­ed Cash: $1,669.10

Total sav­ings: $2,745.78

Handy dandy spread­sheet says my sav­ings for the month was 36%. I need to look at the for­mu­la again, because I’m not entire­ly sure that’s cor­rect. I guess it depends on whether or not you go off gross or adjust­ed pay and what all counts as savings.

Liabilities

Chase Sap­phire Reserve: $0
Chase Unit­ed: $0

Total: $0

Zip, zero, zilch. I offi­cial­ly paid all my cred­it cards off! Woooooo!!

Net Worth

Accord­ing to this, my total net worth is $209,774. I’m up anoth­er $20,000, but still down about $20k from my peak net worth. I’ve most­ly dealt with the finan­cial side of things by ignor­ing the news about the stock mar­ket. Most days I have no idea if the mar­ket goes up or down and I pre­fer it that way. On the bright side, I’m up over $200k again (for the third time).

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