Monthly Spending Report: August 2015

Hard to believe August is already over! It flew by in a flur­ry of sports, fun activ­i­ties and a vari­ety of oth­er events. The State Fair was in town, so I attend­ed a cou­ple of con­certs and ate more fat­ten­ing fair food than I should have. I went back home to vis­it with my fam­i­ly and friends for a long week­end. In addi­tion, I drove to meet friends for their annu­al dog show just a few hours from me. I had a blast and got to see tons of very fine look­ing dogs!

The name of the game this month was “Buy Noth­ing”. I have a post com­ing up that will dive into the expe­ri­ence more­so than I will here. That being said, I focused on find­ing cheap ways of enter­tain­ing myself. Instead of going out to the bars down­town, I bought a 6 pack of ciders to enjoy at home. I watched a few new movies at home rather than going to see movies in the the­aters (com­plete with my own pop­corn!). I have a very expen­sive fan­cy sewing machine that hasn’t got­ten very much use late­ly, so I took the oppro­tu­ni­ty to work on some of my projects I have going on. I also focused on reduc­ing some of my month­ly charges- like eat­ing more lunch­es from home and leav­ing the AC off in my apart­ment.

Why do I do a month­ly spend­ing report?

I find it best to do a month­ly spend­ing report for a few rea­sons. One, 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? Two, 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. Three, I want to prove this crazy thing called finan­cial inde­pen­dence works! Fourth, 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. Some peo­ple use Per­sonal Cap­i­tal and oth­ers use You Need a Bud­get (YNAB). What­ever tool works best for you and your needs is the best one for you, since every­one and their bud­gets are dif­fer­ent.

So, with­out fur­ther ado, I present my spend­ing (for bet­ter or for worse) for August 2015.

I spent a total of $2050 this month!! That’s incred­i­ble! Even more so when you real­ize that a full 50% of that was my rent. I’m glad to see my zero spend month was so effec­tive. Odd­ly, my qual­i­ty of life bare­ly changed. I still went out and spent about $300 on fun stuff, but that was doing fun activ­i­ties with peo­ple. I don’t think I spent any mon­ey on acquir­ing need­less stuff this month, which feels great! There are still things I want, don’t get me wrong, but I’m real­iz­ing just because I want some­thing doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean I need it. I’d much rather accu­mu­late mem­o­ries than things.
What did your month look like? Did you stick to your bud­get?