Monthly Status Report: December 2017

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

Spending

From unusu­al­ly warm tem­per­a­tures to unusu­al­ly COLD tem­per­a­tures. What a dif­fer­ence a few short weeks makes! I feel like I spent 90% of my time in Decem­ber under a blan­ket. I hope to nev­er see ‑30 F wind­chill on my weath­er app again, but I feel like that’s not very real­is­tic giv­en my plans to move north to Min­neso­ta.

Speak­ing of Min­neso­ta, I had a won­der­ful time spend­ing the end of the month there. I famil­iar­ized myself more with the area and got to spend a lot of time with my boyfriend’s fam­i­ly over the hol­i­days. Thank­ful­ly spend­ing time does­n’t cost much of any­thing! My rental expens­es also final­ly came in at a rea­son­able num­ber, so my total expens­es were dras­ti­cal­ly low­er than most of 2017, to be hon­est. I con­sid­er Decem­ber’s spend­ing to be in the ‘nor­mal’ range. If there is such a thing as a nor­mal lev­el in spend­ing.

Check out below for my total spend­ing in Decem­ber!

 

Mort­gage	Not includ­ing prin­ci­pal, which is account­ed else­where on my spread­sheet. Actu­al pay­ment is $705.43 a month!
Util­i­ties	Super cold + leaky old house = high util­i­ty bills
Food	Slight­ly high­er due to hol­i­day meal con­tri­bu­tions.
Phone	Actu­al­ly have a cred­it this month thanks to awe­some Project FI! A com­bo of refer­rals and cred­its 🙂
Auto	Gas and an oil change
Inter­net	The new nor­mal inter­net bill.
Insur­ance	Health insur­ance is paid direct­ly from my pay­check.
Pet	The nor­mal lit­ter and food costs.
Sup­port	Month­ly sup­port for my sis­ter.
Blog	Renew­al fees, new equip­ment, and pod­cast fees.
Fees	Annu­al cred­it card fee
Misc	Doc­tor bill and laun­dry
Gifts	Christ­mas presents 🙂
House	New fil­ters and some gift cards for my ten­ants!

New low­er expens­es are here! WOO! I’ve been wait­ing for this day for a long time. Total spend­ing this month was $3,241 which is amaz­ing! My expens­es have been drop­ping like a stone and I am a big fan. I hope to see this con­tin­ue in the future!

Income

Pay­checks: $16,620.28
Rental income: $1,850

Total: $18,470.28

Hel­lo big beau­ti­ful bonus pay­check! Decem­ber 2017 income was­n’t as high as 2016 due to no mov­ing reim­burse­ments, but I am still incred­i­bly hap­py with the mon­ey I did get. I also got rent from both ten­ants and a deposit from the new ten­ant. Life is good.

Savings

401k: $2,505.66
HSA: $220.82
Cash: $15,000

Total sav­ings: $17,726.48

Lots of extra mon­ey com­ing in means lots of mon­ey stay­ing in my pock­et! (for now). I’m very hap­py I maxed out my 401k in 2017. I will not be doing that in 2018 as I need all the cash I can get right now for the move and sus­tain­ing myself while I work on build­ing income.

Net Worth

If I were going to keep on my cur­rent tra­jec­to­ry, my FI date accord­ing to the Lab over on Mad Fientist’s site would be 5 years and 5 months away, which is May 2023! How­ev­er, since I plan to quit in March, I will no longer be using this as any sort of use­ful bench­mark. I plan to con­tin­ue inputting my num­bers until then, though.

My total net worth end­ed the year at $199,696, a gain of almost $75k for the year and $11k for the month. If you’d like to know more about my 2017 year in review, you can check out my last post for all the awe­some details.

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