Monthly Status Report: October 2016

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:

What a mag­i­cal month! I spent the first two weeks of Octo­ber gal­li­vant­i­ng about West­ern Europe and hav­ing a blast. Since so much of my spend­ing can be direct­ly attrib­uted to my vaca­tion, all of it done on vaca­tion will get put under that cat­e­go­ry and not under food or trans­porta­tion. It seems like just yes­ter­day I was pack­ing my bags and now it’s the begin­ning of Novem­ber.…… crazy talk!

I’ve segued far enough from the num­bers. With­out fur­ther ado, I present my spend­ing (for bet­ter or for worse) for Octo­ber 2016.

Rent	Last month of rent at this price. It goes up 60% when my lease is up Nov. 7th.
Util­i­ties	Going down! Woot woot!
Food	Tech­ni­cal­ly under 😀
Phone	So low. I love Project FI!
Auto	A few tanks of gas and one head­light. Replac­ing the head­light only took 5 min­utes this time! #girlpow­er
Inter­net	Same price as always.
Insur­ance	Health insur­ance is paid direct­ly from my pay­check, and the oth­ers are an aver­age from my 6 month payment.
Pet	Eeks. Every­thing came due at once- wet food, dry food, and cat lit­ter. I also had to buy a replace­ment scratch post.
Sup­port	Sup­port for my eldest sis­ter as she trav­els the world doing good things.
Blog	The oth­er half of the pay­ment for my AWESOME NEW LOGO 🙂
Vaca­tion	Yep. That’s high. Ouch. But super worth it.

All told, my spend­ing totaled $3472.31 for Octo­ber. Ouch. How­ev­er, I con­sid­er it mon­ey well spent as the biggest chunk was on trav­el. My nor­mal spend­ing cat­e­gories were actu­al­ly under bud­get since I was gone the first two weeks! I made a cou­ple of sil­ly errors that result­ed in me hav­ing to buy sil­ly things like a new cat scratch post since I left it at my par­en­t’s house. My head­light also went out only 18 months after I replaced it the last time. I was extra care­ful not to touch the bulb this time. All in all, an amaz­ing month of life and a ‘meh’ month for finances. Despite spend­ing so much mon­ey this month, my sav­ings rate went up to 31.4%. That is below my aver­age for the year, so I will be doing a “No Spend Novem­ber” to boost that aver­age. I mapped out all my expect­ed expens­es for Novem­ber and I’m not going to spend over $2500. (Pro­vid­ed I stay in my cur­rent place and I don’t move for the new job. If I move, I will have all sorts of mov­ing relat­ed expens­es and any bud­get goes out the window.)

Income

Gross: $5,810.00

Adjust­ed: $2,817.84 (after tax­es, deduc­tions and oth­er with­hold­ings are tak­en out)

Tax­es: $1,180.32

A bit low­er than nor­mal since I did­n’t have any side income and I am pay­ing for my extra days of vacation.

Savings

401k: $2,091.60

Roth IRA: $450

HSA: $100.00

Total sav­ings: $2,641.60

A nor­mal month of sav­ings DESPITE the fact I took a two week vaca­tion. Sav­ing is a pri­or­i­ty to me and I will save the same amount even when I’m busy doing oth­er things.

As of 1 Novem­ber, my “cash stash” sits at $105,394.88. I wish this had moved fur­ther up, but lots of trav­el means a big cred­it card bill at the end of the month.

Accord­ing to the Lab over on Mad Fien­tist’s site, my FI date is now 9 years and 8 months away, which means I’m now at June 2026 instead of March 2026. I hope my bonus com­ing in Decem­ber helps pro­pel me back into my tra­jec­to­ry I was on before Sep/Oct. Still, 9 years left in the work­force isn’t bad!

Side Hustle

This month: $150

Total: $1525

Income: $0

Look for my post on my side hustle/hobby soon 🙂

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