Monthly Status Report: March 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

March 2020. The month that last­ed a year and turned our worlds upside down. It start­ed off fair­ly nor­mal­ly. My friend came to vis­it me at the begin­ning of the month. I had a night at the bowl­ing alley with her, my bf and anoth­er local friend. The next day we went to the Mid­west­’s Largest Garage Sale (and flea mar­ket) at Six Flags. We min­gled with thou­sands of peo­ple and touched all kinds of stuff with­out san­i­tiz­ing or social dis­tanc­ing. I joined a D&D group and start­ed my first cam­paign. My bf and I went to see Onward (super cute, very touch­ing) in the movie theater. 

And then it all changed.

One by one by one the oth­er loca­tions of my employ­er went to work from home. By March 13^th, it was clear we also need­ed to work from home. Mon­day, March 16^th marked the first day of social­ly dis­tanc­ing work from home. No more dri­ving to work. No more grab­bing a cof­fee or lunch with cowork­ers. No more stop­ping by the gro­cery store on the way home from work. My com­mute involves not trip­ping over the cat as I walk down the hall­way to my spare room. I bring my lunch to work every day now! Date nights now look like chat­ting over video or watch­ing a show togeth­er on his Plex serv­er. As a result of all these shifts, my spend­ing habits have changed drastically.

Behold the changes impart­ed upon my bud­get by social­ly iso­lat­ing in March 2020!

 

 

Hous­ing	New and improved low­er rent pay­ment. I love LCOL areas!
Util­i­ties	The weath­er got ever so slight­ly warmer, and util­i­ty bills went down slightly
Food	A com­bi­na­tion of nor­mal eat­ing out and gro­ceries, plus sup­port­ing local food places
Phone	I love Google FI! Now with a new unlim­it­ed plan (and pay­ing off my phone)
Auto	One tank of gas
Inter­net	Got­ta have that fast inter­web access
Pet	No need for pet expens­es after stock­ing up.
Blog	Nor­mal expenses!
Enter­tain­ment	Stream­ing sub­scrip­tions, WaPo year­ly sub­scrip­tion, tick­ets to a pop-up bar that hope­ful­ly still hap­pens this summer
Shop­ping	Sup­port­ing local businesses.
Gifts	Polit­i­cal dona­tions, dona­tions to my home church, and oth­er charities
Health	Some extra med­ical sup­plies and therapy

Inter­est­ing­ly enough, even with addi­tion­al spend­ing to help peo­ple less for­tu­nate than I, I still spent less in March than in pre­vi­ous months. I spent $3,196 over all 300 days in March. I bought box­es from the local Farmer’s Mar­ket (deliv­ered straight to my door!), ordered take­out a few times, bought a men­tal well­ness box from a local busi­ness that had to close (includ­ed a can­dle, a bath bomb, and 2 caramels), gave mon­ey to my church fam­i­ly back home and donat­ed to a few oth­er char­i­ties. My spend­ing was still near­ly $700 low­er than Feb­ru­ary. Part of this came from oth­er cat­e­gories drop­ping, like auto, util­i­ties, and trav­el. Nor­mal­ly I buy 2–3 tanks of gas in a month. In March, I filled up once as I sim­ply am not dri­ving as much as I did pre-social dis­tanc­ing. It helps gas prices have also dropped near­ly a dol­lar a gal­lon! It will be inter­est­ing to see where my expens­es fall for April, giv­en that I have bare­ly left the house at all.

Income

Pay­checks: $6,833.34
Oth­er income: $14

Total:$6,847.34

I got a sur­prise $500 cash award on top of my nor­mal pay in April! I vol­un­teered to help pro­duce a con­fer­ence and got incen­tivized to do it again! I seri­ous­ly am proud to work for my new com­pa­ny. They’ve done noth­ing but treat their employ­ees well since all of this start­ed. I also had a few Etsy sales and some inter­est on my sav­ings accounts.

Savings

401k: $1,076.68
Roth: $0
Unal­lo­cat­ed Cash: $1,774.84

Total sav­ings: $2,851.52

Handy dandy spread­sheet says my sav­ings for the month was 53%. 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 $189,930. I’m down about $40,000 from my peak net worth. It’s very bizarre to be blasé about my net worth drop­ping that much, but I know it will even­tu­al­ly come back. I am a bit sad about once again drop­ping down past the $200k mark. The third time is a charm, perhaps?

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