Random Thoughts

Work has been super busy!

C and I have been doing a good job of keeping track of our expenses for this month. I have a spreadsheet that I update every night and I bug him about what he spent. I might be missing some of our reoccurring bills that automatically get charged and paid by our credit card, but that will be easy to reconcile later.

My client right now has a $0.25 for everything vending machine. This means that I'm spending WAY more on snacks than I normally would. I can't figure out if the vending machine is a good thing or a bad thing. A lot of the things end up being cheaper than what I would pay at the store.

Should I wait until I get my next raise (early next year) before leaving and looking for a job or should I start now?

November Challenge: Record What We Spend

Ok, so up for the month of November is a tried and true challenge.

Record every penny my husband and I spend!

Before I didn't have too many vices, but I just started working on a new project. At the client site there is a vending machine. Everything in the vending machine is $.25. They have a lot of good stuff I like there. There also have a large variety of sodas for $.25, more than beyond the usual cola stuff.

The past few months we've been in months with "unexpected" expenses, so I want to see how our spending compares to previous months. Last time we tracked all of our expenses, it came to about $5,000.

Unexpected $$$

Earlier this week, I was happy to receive 2 checks in the mail; one addressed to me and one addressed to my husband. Each was for $85. Totally unexpected, without any letter of explanation from a medical group.

I figure that this medical group overcharged us from some shots we got before our big vacation! I paid $100 for each of us, so I am assuming that the $85 is a reimbursement above our co-pay of $15.

I still haven't figured out exactly how much we spent on that vacation of ours, but now I get to subtract $170.

Every little bit helps!

Grocery Costs

On my last credit card statement, C and I spent approximately $500 on groceries. Some of this spending was a bit more than normal due to my mystery shopping, but the amount just seemed outrageous for a family of two. C and I do try to eat healthy and buy organic products, but I think the real issue was shopping without a list. C and I are both pretty big impulse buyers. So for this upcoming credit card statement (the one we're currently in), I told C that we were going to try to spend $100 or $150, at the most. I figured we would be able to spend a lot less since we did buy a lot of food in the prior month. I'm happy to report that with the credit card statement date almost coming to a close, we're definitely under $150, but over $100. Making goals really does help you improve!

January Spending Review

I am pretty proud to say that my husband and I did a pretty decent job of tracking our expenses for the month of January! I have always been a fan of automated savings, and just spending everything that was left so I didn't really have a good idea of where our money was going. We decided to track all expenses except those expenses that are fully reimbursed by our employers. For example, for any business trips we took, we didn't count the cost of hotel, rental car, airfare, etc. I did count the cost of meals since both my husband and I get per diem when we travel. Per diem is a meal allowance that we got for each day, no matter what we spend. So if I spend $100 on food, some of that is coming out of my own pocket, whereas if I only spend $10 on food, I get to add some extra savings to our monthly inflows.

So here is the breakdown.
Total expenditures: $4,965.48*
Rent: $1,600.00
Tithe: $1050.00
Eating Out $707.92
Gifts $307.70
Groceries $285.45
Misc. $279.68
Monthly Bills $195.87
Travel $165.21
Entertainment $88.00

Since I didn't have any preconceived notions about where our money was going, I was happy that C and I were able to have at least a 1 month record showing the granularities of our expenses. I knew we spent a lot of money on eating out, but I didn't realize it's about 2.5 times as much as we spend on groceries! A lot of this is due to travel schedules. I found it interesting that C and I only had 4 meals out together and only 2 meals out together with just us. Included in those 2 meals we had with others also includes us treating others due to special occasions. I have tried to emphasize that I want our meals out with just us to be special affairs that we really enjoy, rather than an act of convenience. We eat out by ourselves as an act of convenience too much as it is!

Our monthly bills are also missing our monthly electricity bill. We got one at the end of December and another one at the beginning of February. I'm not sure why that happened, but I decided not to include it in our monthly review since we didn't have to pay it out in January.

I thought that our spending on gifts might be abnormally high, but I figure in other months there are other one off items that would offset a lower amount spent on gifts. The travel budget was spent on a weekend trip where some of the expenses were paid in December, so this cost here is less than the cost of the trip, but accurate of what we spent in January.

I know that we forgot a couple of expenses here and there, but this is a good snapshot of what our monthly expenses are. I'm pretty comfortable with this. The main thing I would want to change is to decrease the amount we spend on eating out and increase the amount we spend on groceries!

* Note this does not include automatic payroll deductions like taxes, 401K savings, health care, long term disability insurance, flexible spending accounts nor other savings