Monthly Status Report: January 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

Con­grat­u­la­tions every­one! We sur­vived the year of January!

It seems like most of the inter­net agrees that Jan­u­ary was a month that just.…. last­ed for­ev­er. While I am very grate­ful for a lot of the events that occurred, I was equal­ly hap­py to see the month go.

I’m still work­ing on set­tling in at home and work. I’d say set­tling into St. Louis is eas­i­er than set­tling in at work. I have got­ten to explore more of the city and I love basi­cal­ly every­thing about it (as I stick the safe areas in day­light). Work con­tin­ues to be a chal­lenge. I say tak­ing this job is prob­a­bly the best deci­sion I’ve made in the last two years. I am very hap­py with my new job and have no plans to leave any time soon. It’s so strange to be in a place I like going to each day, where I feel use­ful and like my pres­ence makes a dif­fer­ence. I knew after day 2 at both of my last jobs they weren’t for me. Day 2 of this job had me like, omg I am so excit­ed to be here and can’t wait to learn more! Some days might be a strug­gle to absorb every­thing I need to learn, but I much pre­fer that to strug­gling to fill my time every day.

Finances wise, things calmed down big time. I paid the last bit on my apart­ment in DC, so hous­ing will go back down to sane lev­els. I also joined a CSA and have been enjoy­ing lots of tasty local­ly pro­duced food!

Check out below for all the details of my spend­ing in January!

 

Hous­ing	One last pay­ment to the old place. Good riddance!
Util­i­ties	Not bad con­sid­er­ing I live in a beau­ti­ful his­tor­i­cal apart­ment with “charm”.
Food	Restock­ing my kitchen and the CSA start­up fee!
Phone	I love Google FI! Now with a new unlim­it­ed plan (and pay­ing off my phone).
Auto	Gas, a new head dou­ble DIM head unit and a small repair.
Inter­net	Got­ta have that fast inter­web access.
Pet	The usu­al food and poop rocks.
Blog	Audit com­plete and changes made.
Enter­tain­ment	YouTube music sub­scrip­tion that I use every day.
Shop­ping	New work shoes, and house stuff (most­ly kitchen supplies).
Mis­cel­la­neous	Most­ly the costs of ther­a­py. #sowor­thit
Trav­el	A few car share rides. Don’t drink and drive!
Gifts	A polit­i­cal dona­tion and a gift.

Yeesh there’s some­thing sober­ing about adding up all of your spend­ing in a month. Prob­a­bly why I’ve been putting it off for a few weeks…

Total spend­ing for Jan­u­ary 2020 came in just shy of 5 G’s at $4,976.35. I’m not super hap­py with this spend­ing, but there are 3 sil­ver lin­ings to this. One, I’ve nev­er been hap­pi­er so it’s all worth it. Two, I shaved over $3,000 off the pre­vi­ous mon­th’s spend­ing totals, so that’s a good trend line. Three, I can pret­ty much guar­an­tee spend­ing will con­tin­ue to go down now that I’m done with all the old apart­ment crap in Virginia.

Income

Pay­checks: $6,334.00
Oth­er income: $130.04

Total: $6,463.38

It’s real­ly nice to know what an “aver­age” month of income looks like. I say “aver­age” because there is a lot of things I can charge direct­ly to my account at work, like food, park­ing and even a gym mem­ber­ship. Hope­ful­ly I’ll stop buy­ing so much cof­fee and food from work and my pay­checks will be high­er in the future!

Savings

401k: $1,076.72
Roth: $0
Unal­lo­cat­ed Cash: $0

Total sav­ings: $1,076.72

Handy dandy spread­sheet says my sav­ings for the month was 21%. I guess that’s right on a sur­face lev­el, but most of the extra cash went to pay­ing off my cred­it cards.

Liabilities

Chase Sap­phire Reserve: $2,986.56
Chase Unit­ed: $0

Total: $2,986.56

Looks like I was a bit over­en­thu­si­as­tic fur­nish­ing my apart­ment. My relo­ca­tion mon­ey paid off most of the cards. I should have this cleared out by the end of March.

Net Worth

 

Accord­ing to this, my total net worth is $229,547. I sus­pect this will be the last month I’ll see my net worth go up for a while. But, I have plen­ty of time before I think about retir­ing and using my invest­ments, so I’m con­tent to sit back, con­tin­ue to dol­lar cost aver­age my bi-week­ly 401k con­tri­bu­tions into the mar­ket, go to the Win­ches­ter, have a pint, and let this whole thing blow over.

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