Whoop whoop for being under budget!
I still have to enter the last 3 days of July’s spending into my chart so I’m in denial about already being a week in to August!
2 Likes
It’s the last day of August, so it’s time for more colorful tables and charts!
Spending notes:
- It’s my first month since I began reporting here without a big lumpy expense, so the total is less than previous months.
- I will have a lot more home repair expenses related to the flooding from 2 weeks ago, but I haven’t spent much on it so far.
- Groceries are a little high again due to feeding extra people and stocking up on some things.
- I had $31 in unreported spending at the end of June (or early July?), because I put it on a cc I rarely use and didn’t check when I did my month-end summary. Surprised me when the bill came!
- I paid for two months of housecleaning this month because of how the days of the month worked out (Aug 2 and 30).
Here’s the spending chart:
And I’m on vacation again. I’m supposed to be cleaning the vacation house this evening so I can head out early tomorrow to beat the remnants of Ida, but I’ve been procrastinating by doing my expense reporting for the month.
(Edits to make the table and chart totals match. Silly rounding!)
5 Likes
Trying to figure out what the monthly 2022 budget might look like based on prior spend and some guesses about how that might change. This is what I’m pencilling in atm.
Property tax - 385 (lumpy, 4620 annual)
Home insurance - 85
Natural gas - 90
Electricity/hydro - 70
Internet - 105
Phone - 65 (tbd once I lose my work cell phone)
Travel/culture - 700 (lumpy, 8400 annual)
Grocery/food - 700
House/garden/furniture/electronics - 300
Dental/glasses/drugs - 170 (lumpy)
Books/crafts/gifts - 125
Clothing - 125
Transit - 120 (this is a complete shot in the dark)
The books/crafts/gifts and clothing seem high to me, but they’re also what we’ve actually been doing. Food is higher than we’ve been doing, but I figure I’ll have more coffee/lunch meetups.
5 Likes
Looks like you have a good handle on your expenses. There are only a few categories where you expect your spending to be different post working, and they are not huge.
You say transit is a shot in the dark. I can see that, since you don’t know where you are likely to be going when, or how you would get there. How does your guess compare to what you are spending now?
3 Likes
Well the past year we’ve put $100 on a transit card, but we certainly haven’t spent $100, maybe $40. I think it’s $3 per trip at the moment. So that is 40 one way trips a month. 10 trips back and forth if both of us go somewhere by city transit. Trains are a bit more, but we don’t use them often.
I don’t think I ever pulled it out, but we probably used to spend about 250 a month on transit.
1 Like
This is old school, but it worked for us.
We had a notebook The fixed expenses were all there. What we paid was there.
When we became romantically entangled/engaged/married, the way this worked out was that since I was still working, we used me pay to pay for some certain things, electric, for example. I’d pay that bill from my checking account, and we just kept the same notebook for a while.
After a few years, we decided it was insane to maintain 2 checking accounts, two savings accounts, etc. and got joint accounts and literally closed the book we’d had. We have never really gotten together to find one system that works other than this. DH now makes almost all the $ and pays all the bills online. I know where the spreadsheet is, etc. but I don’t do it.
If I were going to do this now? I’d insist on a savings category, which we didn’t have (we were broke college kids when this started) and want regular “state of the money” summits. Now, for us, it’s DH’s balliwick. I get to comment, do things when needed, but it’s not mine or even 1/2 mine to do. In some ways that’s very nice. In other ways, it’s very worrisome.
2 Likes
Year-end spending report:
Other cash flow not shown above:
Mortgage principal: $24,167
Charitable giving: $4,350
My top-line “budget”, if I have one, is $40k plus mortgage principal. So I finished the year with room to spare.
7 Likes
Ahhhhhhh I LOVE your charts 
1 Like
Not having anywhere else to put this, I’m reviving this topic. Behold, my 2022 expense chart. Much increased from 2021, above.
Other cash flow not shown above:
Mortgage principal: $24,747
Charitable giving: $5,275
Analysis:
increase in home repair (paying someone else to evict the squirrels from my attic and prevent them from returning)
increase in travel and gas for the car (yay travel, boo gas prices)
increase in food (more eating out)
decrease in other (mostly recreation category)
10 Likes
A note about groceries: I actually spent slightly less in 2022 ($1828, $152/month) than 2021 ($1981, $165/month)
3 Likes
Your groceries are insanely low. Wow!
2 Likes
I mostly shop at Aldi and some extreme couponing from Safeway and Harris Teeter. RIP HT’s $10 off $30 weekly coupons. They are now $10 off $50 and I don’t spend that much there in a week.
4 Likes
Great job on groceries! Ours were way too expensive this year! I’m posting a chart with percentages, as I find that more illuminating for me.
Allowances covers recreation, entertainment, education, clothing, hobbies and charity. It is such a big percentage of our expenses this year because we transferred some money leftover from our house sale 3 years ago into a TFSA for Hubby. Normally allowances would be 1/5 that amount.
The hobbies section is misleading. Hubby has to send money internationally for one of his hobbies. He runs it through our regular bank account and then pays it back. So effectively, those particular expenses are on there twice - once as hobbies and again in allowances.
It’s not much, but I’m not happy with the fees section. We do not have complicated taxes, and receive no financial planning advice, and yet we pay a lot for a financial advisor. Hubby and I go back and forth on this every year.
Household is things like cleaners, paper products, soap, shampoo, toothpaste…that kind of stuff. It, too, is much larger than I thought.
Salary deductions is extra Hubby pays on income tax so he can get a refund every year to spend however he wants! I’ve tried to explain to him that all he is doing is giving the government an interest free loan, but it falls on deaf ears. He just hates paying extra at the end of the year…even though we have it.
Groceries are much higher than I like them to be. Ideally I’d like them to sit around 8% of the budget. I’m going to have to work hard to get them there. Housing and transportation are okay. Dining out is high.
Medical is high considering we live in the land of free medicare. Most of that is medical insurance, which is crappy here.
Here’s to a better 2023!
5 Likes
Another year, another chart. And I thought I spent a lot in 2022. Ha! This was my spendiest year ever.
Other cash flow not shown above:
Mortgage principal: $25,345
Charitable giving: $6,000
Analysis:
So much epic travel! And there’s more than this chart shows, since (a) I used points for 6 flights and numerous (more than 6) hotel nights. And (b) camping nights are shown in the recreation category.
Other increases:
- Recreation. In addition to more camping, I bought a (used) bike, replaced some kayak gear, and paid other people to take me kayaking in exotic places.
- Home repair. HVAC repair, partial chimney repointing, and renovating a room in my basement.
- School. (somehow didn’t make it onto the chart categories but is included in the “other” category ) About $1k in unexpected expenses my grad school funding didn’t cover.
11 Likes
I’m floored by that food budget
1 Like
Gotta love Aldi. And eating from my freezer.
It looks slightly less than last year. But not really because I included some food in travel. I never know what to do with restaurant food that I’m only having because I don’t have access to kitchen facilities, which is different from restaurant food that I’m having by choice. So some travel dining ended up in dining and some in travel.
11 Likes
I do the same thing with eating out due to travel!
3 Likes