Monthly Spending Report: September 2015

 

Some­one wake up Bil­ly Joel! Sep­tem­ber is def­i­nite­ly over now. The weath­er is start­ing to cool off (low­er util­i­ty bills yay!) and pump­kin fla­vored every­thing is pop­ping up all over the place. This month was full of fun activ­i­ties, which includ­ed things like the start of the fall soc­cer sea­son and get­ting a crash course in play­ing the vio­lin. This month also com­prised of some not so fun activ­i­ties, like lots of med­ical appoint­ments and being sick. I seem to have got­ten a fair­ly light ver­sion of what­ev­er is going on so at least I have that going for me.

I got to see some friends on a quick road­trip one week­end. That was a great time and pret­ty cheap! All I had to do was dri­ve there and get some drinks. Speak­ing of cheap events, I drove out to the mid­dle of nowhere (not that dif­fi­cult to find nor that far away where I live) with a friend and some ice cream to watch the super­moon lunar eclipse. See­ing the ful­ly eclipsed moon sur­round­ed by the Milky Way and more stars than either of us could count was the clos­est thing to mag­ic I’ve ever expe­ri­enced. Best part was all we spent was $4 on some ice cream and some gas for the car. Who said you had to spend lots of mon­ey to have a good time!?

Why do I do a month­ly spend­ing report?

I find it best to do a month­ly spend­ing report for a few rea­sons. One, 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? Two, 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. Three, I want to prove this crazy thing called finan­cial inde­pen­dence works! Fourth, 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. Some peo­ple use Per­sonal Cap­i­tal and oth­ers use You Need a Bud­get (YNAB). What­ever tool works best for you and your needs is the best one for you, since every­one and their bud­gets are different.

So, with­out fur­ther ado, I present my spend­ing (for bet­ter or for worse) for Sep­tem­ber 2015.

 

 

Gas & Fuel	Much low­er than last month! I stayed fair­ly close to home and did­n’t take too many unnec­es­sary trips.
Util­i­ties	My util­i­ties went down a full $20 from last month! I can’t wait to see how much more it can drop with the cool­er weather!
Food & Dining	This was a bad month for food. Worth every pen­ny I spent though!
Rent	Notice I only paid $1037 instead of $1057. I saved $20 on my pet fee this month! It’s too bad my apart­ment com­plex does­n’t do more activ­i­ties so that I could save more often.
Pets	I low­ered the set amount to $60 with a rollover option to help off­set the ran­dom­ness of pur­chas­ing his dry food.
Gifts	I donat­ed some to a polit­i­cal cam­paign and also chipped in for a cowork­er’s retire­ment gift.
Per­son­al Care	I got a hair­cut at the begin­ning of the month (and do I look good now!).
Shop­ping	This cov­ered var­i­ous items like soc­cer uni­forms and some oth­er things need­ed for my place.
Uncat­e­go­rized	Most­ly checks I wrote to reim­burse peo­ple for things they cov­ered for me.

 

My total spent this month was $2012! That’s it! Not only that, it again includes 50% of that being my rent. Hav­ing two con­sec­u­tive months hov­er­ing around $2k feels great, and tells me that it is actu­al­ly pos­si­ble to not have to spend a crazy amount of mon­ey. If you recall, my tar­get retire­ment num­ber is based off me spend­ing $23,500 a year. At just over $2k, I’d only have to cut back slight­ly. That should be easy to accom­plish once I don’t need to live close to work in a fan­cy, expen­sive area. Not to men­tion all the mon­ey I usu­al­ly spend eat­ing food at work.

I was play­ing around with some num­bers on the back of a nap­kin a week or so ago and found I was­n’t cal­cu­lat­ing my sav­ings per­cent­age cor­rect­ly. I used to think I was at a pal­try 35%, but instead my base rate of sav­ings is 42%! By doing noth­ing, I’m sav­ing almost half of my income! When I have low spend­ing months like August and Sep­tem­ber, that num­ber jumps up to 70%!! It’s crazy to me that a rel­a­tive­ly small amount ($1k) can have such a big impact on the per­cent­age. The more mon­ey I can stash away ear­li­er, the more com­pound inter­est will be on my side and the faster I can be finan­cial­ly independent.

Look­ing into Octo­ber, I can already tell it’s going to be a rough month on my bud­get. My mom is com­ing to vis­it for a quilt show, so I antic­i­pate lay­ing out some cash there. It’s also my birth­day month, and the Chau­tauqua in Ecuador fol­lows short­ly after that. It’s going to be a fun and busy month!

What did your month look like? Did you stick to your budget?