Monthly Status Report: March 2019

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

March felt like the longest month ever. My room­mate and I were dis­cussing the month and real­ized a super fun night out at all you can eat sushi was in March and not like, in Jan­u­ary. It felt like way more than 4 weeks before. I feel like that’s a mark of how much I’m enjoy­ing liv­ing here in DC. The first part of the month, I was still in Vir­ginia. I then flew to Chica­go to hang out with friends and to dri­ve the rest of my stuff to my new place in DC. While I was home I man­aged to get a fam­i­ly din­ner in and have lunch with my best friend. I miss home, but not as much as I like liv­ing in a big city like DC!

The last two weeks were spent set­tling into my new place and fig­ur­ing out a rou­tine. I start­ed rid­ing my bike to work and bring­ing my meals to work. I hear you can save lots of mon­ey doing that so I thought I’d give it a shot. It’s 5.5 miles one way and I have the best com­mute I could pos­si­bly ask for. Loop around Capi­tol Hill, down the Mall, hang a left at the Wash­ing­ton Memo­r­i­al, pass the Jef­fer­son Memo­r­i­al and cross the Potomac Riv­er into Vir­ginia. I love it!

I’ve start­ed to pare down my stuff and des­ig­nate var­i­ous piles to throw away, give away and sell. It goes slow­ly because I’m over­ly attached to phys­i­cal objects but progress is being made!

Obvi­ous­ly hav­ing fun in Chica­go and dri­ving my stuff back to DC was­n’t cheap at all. I spent more than I liked, but March was my first ever 3 pay­check month so I had a lit­tle bit of an extra buffer!

Check out below for my total spend­ing in March 2019.

 

Hous­ing	A steal of a deal for DC proper.
Util­i­ties	I paid for March’s util­i­ties in April.
Food	I about cried. More on the food below.
Phone	Thanks to Project FI open­ing up their refer­ral pro­gram again, I had cred­its to off­set my bill.
Auto	Bike repairs, han­dle­bar cam­era, Metro card top offs and a ton of gas for the rental truck.
Inter­net	Same case for the utilities.
Insur­ance	Not as high as it should be thanks to a screw up with­in my ben­e­fits depart­ment at work.
Pet	Got some more food and lit­ter for the Fuzz.
Shop­ping	Some new clothes and new fur­nish­ings for my new place!
Blog	Blog and pod­cast­ing expenses
Enter­tain­ment	MLB.tv annu­al sub­scrip­tion. I can watch every game of my beloved Car­di­nals baseball!
Shop­ping	Some replace­ment clothes and things for the trip from the Midwest.
Misc	Some fur­nish­ings for my new place and oth­er ran­dom stuff that does­n’t go in anoth­er category.
Trav­el	Rental trucks aint cheap. Also includ­ed a night in a hotel on the way.
Gifts	My niece’s birth­day present and a dona­tion to a good cause.

So.… food.…. it was a lot. I broke it up into four dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories: lunch at work, Chica­go, oth­er trav­el, and gro­ceries. I spent almost $100 on food just to eat at work! That’s crazy high!

Chica­go was basi­cal­ly Gwen doing the Hun­gry Hun­gry Cater­pil­lar through the many delec­table offer­ings avail­able. Brunch, BBQ, fan­cy cafes, gluten-free bak­eries — noth­ing was safe. There were 3–4 of us eat­ing and drink­ing through the week­end, so we all took turns pay­ing. Fogo de Chao is expen­sive but soooooo gooooood.….

I also need­ed to stock up on essen­tials for the kitchen. I moved in with very lit­tle food and need­ed basi­cal­ly every­thing. My new room­mate has a Cost­co mem­ber­ship and I dropped about $235 there. I got basics like break­fast for the next month+, more frozen chick­en breasts than I can eat in a cou­ple months, a big honkin bag of rice and some gluten free prod­ucts like piz­za, bread and bougie granola.

The rest of the food bud­get came from gro­ceries I could­n’t get at Cost­co (rea­son­able quan­ti­ties of yogurt and fresh fruit) and eat­ing out with friends. All you can eat sushi is the only kind of sushi I like to eat! It’s so good here in DC on the coast (as opposed to slight­ly old­er stuff in the Midwest).

I would also like to HIGHLIGHT the impor­tance of keep­ing an eye on your pay stubs. I was inputting every­thing into my spread­sheet and noticed two out of my three pay­checks did­n’t have any mon­ey tak­en out for ben­e­fits. One quick call to the ben­e­fits hot­line at work and we fig­ured out the sys­tem spon­ta­neous­ly dumped me. Good thing bik­ing through Down­town DC isn’t dan­ger­ous or any­thing, because I did­n’t have health insur­ance for 3 weeks! As I told the lady, I’d rather have the mon­ey tak­en out and have ben­e­fits than keep­ing the mon­ey and not hav­ing benefits.

Blog/podcasting expens­es were a lit­tle high­er than nor­mal thanks to renew­ing my blog domain for the next year.

At $5,047.66, this month was far more expen­sive than the aver­age. Mov­ing halfway across the US and get­ting set­tled in a new place costs a lot! I’m look­ing for­ward to my expens­es going way down as I set­tle into a routine.

Income

Pay­checks: $8,923.19
Oth­er income: $21

Total: $8,944.19

Thank­ful­ly, March was my first ever 3 pay­check month. It is so help­ful to have extra check! I’ve always been a “paid twice a month no mat­ter what” kind of employ­ee, so I’m pret­ty pumped I get to decide what to do with my extra checks. The oth­er income came from Con­vertK­it affil­i­ates and an Etsy sale.

Savings

401k: $446.16
HSA: $84.61
Roth: $0
Cash: $3,344.76

Total sav­ings: $3,895.53

I would be over­spend­ing this month if not for the fact I had that extra pay­check. My 401(k) sav­ings are high­er thanks to the extra con­tri­bu­tions as well. Since I did get an extra check, my sav­ings rate clocked in at 43% for March. Pret­ty good but I think I can do bet­ter in April.

 

Net Worth

 

Accord­ing to this, my total net worth is $199,335. So close to hit­ting that $200k mark again! My old 401k is going gang­busters in this favor­able mar­ket envi­ron­ment. Got­ta get all that com­pound interest!

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