Monthly Status Report: September 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

Sep­tem­ber. It uh.… sure was something.

Sep­tem­ber saw my beloved Levi bite the dust and get replaced. What a trip that is on my bud­get. Hon­est­ly, not sure how best to put that in the bud­get going for­ward but I can’t keep putting this off for­ev­er! Espe­cial­ly as the end of Octo­ber looms omi­nous­ly in the distance.

I feel like I did­n’t do a whole lot in Sep­tem­ber oth­er than think about and eat food. I also said farewell to my food co-op. Too many weird veg­gies were meet­ing untime­ly deaths in my fridge. The weath­er is get­ting cool­er and the days short­er. I can’t say that I am a fan. I’m cold-blood­ed so it’s near­ly time for me to hiber­nate under my usu­al 3 lay­ers of clothes and blan­kets. Brrrrrr!

Enough rem­i­nisc­ing! Time to get to the main event. I know all you voyeurs just want to see the bud­get laid out. Behold — Sep­tem­ber 2020.

Hous­ing	The usu­al LCOL rent payment
Food	So much food. I might’ve went over­board get­ting food for me and my bf to eat.
Util­i­ties	Air con­di­tion­ing. Still a thing in St Louis in September.
Phone	I love Google FI! This month is my last phone payment.
Auto	A tank of gas for the new car and some stuff for the old car.
Inter­net	Got­ta have that fast inter­web access
Pet	No new poop rocks or cat food need­ed this month.
Blog	My Drop­box renewed.
Enter­tain­ment	Stream­ing sub­scrip­tions (YT Music, Mario Kart, Netflix).
Fees	My stu­pid cred­it card year­ly fees hit ($450 for CSR, $99 for CSP)
Misc	Sup­port­ing local businesses
Gifts	Start­ing to do my sea­son­al shop­ping for gifts

Total spend­ing for Sep­tem­ber 2020 was $3,243. This does­n’t include any­thing to do with the new car trans­ac­tion because it’s com­pli­cat­ed. I will include the debt going for­ward in the sec­tions below, though. Mint sim­pli­fies things a bit too much sometimes.

Some things to note.… My phone bill will go down $30 start­ing next month as I have now offi­cial­ly paid off my phone. 2 years ago when I need­ed a new phone, I did­n’t have the $700 on hand to buy it out­right so I took advan­tage of Google’s 0% financ­ing. Now that my phone is paid off, it’s time to think about get­ting a new one! Hah, just kid­ding. But I will be putting some mon­ey aside for a new one before I need it so I don’t have to have a phone pay­ment any­more. I also bought a few fun cloth­ing and home improve­ment items this month. I watched The Home Edit’s show on Net­flix and was inspired to orga­nize my new cof­fee sta­tion so it did­n’t look a cup­board threw up all over my cart. So neat and orga­nized now!

A pret­ty respon­si­ble month, all told!

Income

Pay­checks: $3,963.19
Oth­er income: 0

Total: $3,963.19

The usu­al month­ly salary (after tax this time). A fair­ly bor­ing month income-wise. No spe­cial sales, no tax refunds. Can’t have that every month!

Savings

401k: $1,076.68
Roth: $0
Unal­lo­cat­ed Cash: $1,520.53

Total sav­ings: $2,597.21

Handy dandy spread­sheet says my sav­ings for the month was 48%. Math is hard. This for­mu­la is appar­ent­ly 401k + Unal­lo­cat­ed Cash divid­ed by my pre-tax income.

Liabilities

Car (Mazda3): TBD
Chase Sap­phire Reserve: $2,408
Chase Unit­ed: $0

Total: $2,408

My cred­it cards get paid off every month to zero. The car will not get paid off to zero at the end of the month. I’ll pay $410 a month and what­ev­er extra mon­ey comes my way. That should pay it off about a year ear­ly. The last time I had a car pay­ment was when I was 18 and now I remem­ber how nice it is to not have a car pay­ment. Full account­ing of the car to come next month!

Net Worth

Accord­ing to this, my total net worth is $251,662! It did go down about $15k from August but I’m still above that $250k line (for now!). You might also notice I knocked down the val­ue of Levi to $500 and includ­ed anoth­er pen­sion line. Now that my pen­sion fund from my cur­rent employ­er actu­al­ly has some mon­ey in it, I’ve decid­ed to start includ­ing it. I think I’ll prob­a­bly update that once or twice a year as get­ting the num­ber from my ben­e­fits site is kind of a pain.

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