Monthly Status Report: October 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

Octo­ber passed by qui­et­ly and quick­ly. It was a month of fun and excite­ment and hang­ing out with friends and utter exhaus­tion. I turned the ripe old age of 29 in the mid­dle of the month while I was in Cal­i­for­nia at Camp FI South­west in Joshua Tree. There’s beau­ty in the utter des­o­la­tion of the desert. I real­ly enjoyed the chance to check out the Joshua Trees (which are actu­al­ly giant suc­cu­lents, not real trees). I’ll trea­sure the mem­o­ries I made with the peo­ple there for a life­time. Belt­ing out the song Cal­i­for­nia Girls by Katy Per­ry in the hot tub with friends under the stars in Cal­i­for­nia as my birth­day approached was a top 10 moment for sure. 

My favorite base­ball team, the St. Louis Car­di­nals, made the play­offs and advanced far enough to play the Wash­ing­ton Nation­als. I was deter­mined to go see my team play in the post­sea­son on my birth­day so I sprung for tick­ets and took my friend with me. He lives lit­er­al­ly right across the street, so it was easy for him. Less easy for me as I watched my team lose the game and get swept in 4 games to see the Nation­als advance to the World Series. I was sad, but at least my team lost to the even­tu­al win­ners, and the even­tu­al win­ners are my cur­rent town team, so it could be worse.

Despite all those fun events, I did­n’t actu­al­ly spend a ton of mon­ey in Octo­ber, which shocked me when I added every­thing up! See below for a detailed break­down of all the spend­ing for the best month of 2019!

Hous­ing	DC hous­ing is stu­pid expen­sive to live on your own
Util­i­ties	I expect util­i­ties to stay under that $200 limit.
Food	Under bud­get! I get free lunch a lot from meet­ing left­overs which low­ers my costs.
Phone	I love Google FI! This is a lot high­er than nor­mal as I switched from pay as you go to unlimited.
Auto	Gas, top­ping off my Metro card, and park­ing expenses.
Inter­net	Got­ta have that fast inter­web access.
Pet	Food and poop rocks for the kitty
Blog	The usu­al fees for the blog.
Enter­tain­ment	$450 to see my Car­di­nals lose in per­son plus some oth­er fun stuff.
Shop­ping	Some more clothes, some stuff for the apart­ment and new bar shampoo/conditioner.
Fees	Stu­pid tax. Even per­son­al finance blog­gers can for­get to pay their util­i­ty bill when traveling.
Trav­el	Most­ly rides to and from the air­ports on my trips in October.

I spent about $675 less than Sep­tem­ber for a total of $3,856.25! I’m final­ly see­ing a lot of resid­ual debt oblig­a­tions fall off. My 0% inter­est card is at zero, my phone is near­ly paid off, and this was the last month the util­i­ty com­pa­ny charged me a $60 fee to be a new cus­tomer. (I get that mon­ey back after a year of on-time pay­ments. You’d think my near­ly 800 cred­it score would be good enough proof I can pay my bills on time, but not accord­ing to Domin­ion Ener­gy.) All of these add up to a few hun­dred extra dol­lars in my bud­get each month which is super help­ful in freak­ing-expen­sive-to-do-almost-every­thing DC.

Income

Pay­checks: $5,481.12
Oth­er income: $1,101.32

Total: $6,582.44

Not bad for acci­den­tal­ly miss­ing a day on my timesheet. Trav­el real­ly skewed a lot of things this month. All income is pre-tax.

Savings

401k: $438.49
HSA: $166.66
Roth: $0
Cash: $881.38

Total sav­ings: $1,486.53

I took my gross pay from my W2 job, added in all the extra mon­ey I got, then sub­tract­ed my bud­get­ed and unbud­get­ed expens­es to get my cash sav­ings amount. My handy dandy spread­sheet says I saved 41.4% this month which feels great!

Net Worth

 

Accord­ing to this, my total net worth is $216,927, which is a brand new record for me. Most of that growth came from my invest­ments in my 401k which is going bananas! At some point, with all this job-hop­ping, I’ll have to go through the pain and agony of con­sol­i­dat­ing all my accounts into one. I haven’t quite reached that pain point yet, but it would real­ly help that com­pound inter­est along if I merged them into one. Food for thought on a cold win­ter day, perhaps.

This is usu­al­ly the sec­tion where I see how much time I have left until ear­ly retire­ment, but I’m not focus­ing on that kind of goal any­more. Instead, I’ll say I had a good month! Men­tal health is more impor­tant to me right now than sav­ing as much mon­ey as I pos­si­bly can. What­ev­er your goal, I hope you made good strides towards it like I did!

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