March 2015 Expenditures

Out like a lion!

Getting back into the swing of things with another post this week! Whoo!

Trying to find some good FI blogs. Still have some of my favorites (see the sidebar to the right), but always looking to feed that hunger for more!

As a reminder to you, our readers, our goals for our financial journey:

Goals.
Our immediate goals are simple:

1. Pay down our $12,000 in credit card debt. We're now down to $9,605. So, we've paid off (including extra interest payments) almost $3,000 in three months. The majority of that being in March.
2. Increase our Emergency Savings from $100 to $1000. Longer term, we'd like to increase this to 6 months of our salaries. We've put this goal on the back burner for now in order to pay off debt more quickly.
3. Save for our vacation in November ($1000-$1500). We had the money set aside for this. We put it toward paying off the debt up front now, so we can reduce the amount of interest we're paying. We know that we can set aside roughly the $120/month for our vacation in November.
4. Save for a possible down payment on a new car ($2000-$2500). I think we're at the point where we're comfortable pushing this goal out until next year, so that will help our financial goals.

It's good to see that we're making progress on the biggest goal (debt repayment), but at the same time, it's frustrating to see a lack of progress on our other goals. In reality, we're putting all goals off in order to pay down our debt.

Well, at the very least, let's see how we did.

Mortgage: $1,116.91

Back to our normal mortgage payments this month. I also included a couple small house-related payments here - home improvement type stuff. Nothing out of the ordinary here!

Heat/Gas/Electricity/Utilities: $398.99

Gas - $89
Electricity - $103
Gas - $92
Water/Trash - $114

I put the breakdown for this category because it was almost twice as much as February. Two reasons. 1, we paid our bi-monthly city municipal bill which includes our water bill and trash bill. The second reason it was higher was that we paid our April gas bill a couple days early, and I continued to keep it in the budget for March to reflect when the money was actually taken out of our account.

Internet/Netflix/Cable: $264.54

DirecTV - $102
DirecTV - $107
Internet - $55
Netflix - $8

Like the utilities category, we paid ahead on our DirecTV bill. Kept it in the budget for March to reflect when it was actually paid.

Cell Phones: $122.10

Since February, we've had a lower Verizon bill because of the changes I made in January. 

Auto: $279

Back to the normal auto loan payment. Boo!

Car Insurance: $73.59

Back on track on this one.

Window Loan: $281.40

No change here.

Web Hosting / Adobe: $80.13

Bought a new domain and one month of hosting, in addition to normal expenses.

Fitness: $63.64

Weight Watchers. Registration for Half-Marathon in June.

Medicine / Therapist: $75

A couple visits to the therapist and normal medication payments.

Groceries: $406.05

Seems to be our normal area. We actually budgeted for $400 here, so this was spot on where we wanted to be.

Takeout: $276.65

Less than February by about $10. More than our $200 budget, though!

Date Nights: $96.25

Less than our budget by $24. 

Clothing / Makeup / massage: $227.13

Mrs. Corn Fed bought some new spring clothes, and has also been losing weight (due to Weight Watchers), so needed better fitting clothes! A good problem for us to have!

Dog Expenses: $216.86

Normal vet visit for the puppy and a couple bags of dog food. Also includes new treats and some new toys - puppies go through toys quickly!

Gas: $234.60

Had some longer weekend trips this month, so we had larger gas bills.

Other: -$821.63

What?

What this actually means is that we gained $821.63 in the "other" category this month. How did we do that? It's basically our tax refund. We applied this to our credit card, so it was basically a wash, as you'll see in the next segment.

As you can see, we've basically removed any savings. For better or for worse. But due to a combination of reducing our spending, our tax refund, and some extra cash, we put almost $1900 towards our credit card this month! Whoo!

Like I said in the previous write-up, "Our priority, right or wrong, is paying down the credit card as fast as possible."

So how did we do overall?

This is a little skewed because of how much we put towards the credit card this month. We put more towards the credit card than we actually pulled in, hence the difference in the overall monthly budget.

I looked at Mint to see if we're on the right track. So far for the year, Mint is pretty accurate with a positive cash flow of $1865 for the first quarter of the year. That accurately portrays how we've been able to contribute so much to our credit card debt in the first three months!

Frugalwoods Method of Non-Mortgage Spending.

March - $4,155.23
February - $3,924.79
January - $3,538.65

A bit higher than February. We obviously contributed much more to our credit card debt, but on the other side, we had a full mortgage payment this month. So, overall, we did spend quite a bit more than we have the past two months. 

We're 25% done with 2015! What?! Are you 25% of the way to your goals for the year?

February 2015 Expenditures - LATE

Better late than never?

Taken quite the break from regular postings here. It's been a crazy couple of months on the home front. Lots of puppy training, volunteering, and other activities that have kept us busy for the last few months.

I've continued to read my favorite FI (Financial Independence) blogs over that time, continuing the inspiration from the beginning of this journey three months ago.

Back in January, I wrote about our goals as we started on our FI journey.

Goals.
Our immediate goals are simple:

1. Pay down our $12,000 in credit card debt.
2. Increase our Emergency Savings from $100 to $1000. Longer term, we'd like to increase this to 6 months of our salaries.
3. Save for our vacation in November ($1000-$1500).
4. Save for a possible down payment on a new car ($2000-$2500). I'd like to push this out further, but Mrs. Corn Fed prefers newer, lower maintenance vehicles.

I want to keep at least some sort of continuity in our blog posts, so I'll save the updates on those goals for the March Expenditures post (which will be written right after this one!)

Keeping track and staying positive.

As it was in January, it's important for us to remember that even though three months feels like a long time, we are only beginning this journey. Our focus continues to be improving our finances month-by-month. 

So, let's see how we did this month!

Mortgage: $541.20

No! This is NOT a mis-print. I called our mortgage company and asked to change our withdrawal dates to be semi-monthly, rather than bi-weekly. The bi-weekly was causing our checking account to be extremely low at weird times of the month. This was one step towards managing our account better and timing when our bills go out of our account. So far, it's helped us avoid several overdraft fees which were common in the months prior.

Heat/Gas/Electricity/Utilities: $206

Yes, this was higher than last month, but if you remember, we paid our bill a little late, so it was going to show up in February instead of January. That's what is reflected here in our higher line item.

Internet/Netflix/Cable: $110.60

Nothing new here. Still waiting to get out of our contract with DirecTV.

Cell Phones: $122.10

Yay for data tracking!

As I wrote in January, Verizon temporarily dropped their prices by $10/month. I took advantage of that and dropped our plan down from 4GB/month to 2GB/month based on our average usage. Saved us almost $25 this month!

6-Month Data Usage - February

6-Month Data Usage - March

As you can see, our average use is now hovering around 1.3GB/month. Switching to podcasts instead of Spotify Premium has definitely helped cut down on my data usage (as I'm the data-hog in the family.)

Auto: $0

No auto expenses this month. One more month of no auto payment - thanks to a nice Christmas present. 

Car Insurance: $73.59

Back on track on this one.

Window Loan: $281.40

No change here.

Cleaning Lady: $140.00

Last year, Mrs. Corn Fed hurt her back, so to keep up with chores we hired someone to come clean our house every two weeks. We had her come two times in January, but she didn't cash the checks until February. Double ugh.

Web Hosting / Adobe: $93.94

More than January because of timing of Adobe Creative Cloud payment.

Fitness: $142.43

Two expenses for this. Weight Watchers for Mrs. Corn Fed. Marathon fee for me. It's still several months out, but registration opened in February, so I was able to get the cheapest registration that'll be available.

Petsitter: $70.00

Transitioned this month to having the petsitter only a few days a week, then Mrs. Corn Fed and I started coming home every day to cut back on this expense. 

Medicine / Therapist: $30

$10 for medication and $20 for therapist co-pay.

Groceries: $326.75

Much, much better than January. About $400 better.

Takeout: $287.05

Um, this was 2x as much as January. Guess we spend that food money somewhere!

Date Nights: $208.67

Had a few extra date nights during the month of February. We did take a weekend trip, and so there were some additional travel costs with that trip that are included here. The other big one here was we went to a movie out and got treats as well, so that was $40 just for movie and theater snacks.

Clothing / Makeup / massage: $120.11

We adjusted this category in February to better reflect how we were spending the money. Chiropractor visit and message for Mrs. Corn Fed's back.

Dog Expenses: $776.01

Normal puppy shots for Corn Fed Hound Junior. Corn Fed Hound Senior had some health issues this month. We took him to the veterinarian because he was sick, and the vet found multiple tumors growing off his internal organs. So, we incurred some major expenses with those tests/scans, and then euthanizing him as well. They give us a week or so tops, so it wasn't really a choice of what we could do. It was just a matter of when. :( 

Gas: $94.09

Pretty much normal commuting here.

Other: $100.05

We need to evaluate the "other" category. Too easy to place anything here and not think about it - "out of sight, out of mind." Just several miscellaneous items that add up over the month.

A main focus of ours in our budgeting is increasing our savings, and paying down our debt. We've made sure to include these in our monthly budget so we don't use the "we'll use whatever is leftover" method, which doesn't work for us.

As you can see, we did good for both our "Car and Travel" account and paying down more than we budgeted for the credit card. We ended up not putting anything towards our Home account, nor our Emergency fund.

Our priority, right or wrong, is paying down the credit card as fast as possible.

So how did we do overall?

Much better than January!

Even with some large unexpected costs (putting our old dog to sleep), we stayed on track. What a relief.

We've pretty much lowered our Stationary Bills to their lowest amounts, so we're solely focused on lowering and keeping track of our flexible bills.

Frugalwoods Method of Non-Mortgage Spending.

February - $3924.79
January - $3,538.65

A bit higher in February, but this is mainly due to two changes. One, our mortgage payment dates changed, so we only payed $541 towards our mortgage this month. Second, we incurred almost $800 in vet bills this month. Can't wait to see how this looks for March.

So that's our February! How did yours go? How did the shorter month affect your budget?

How Getting New Windows Affects Our Budget

Window Leaks are NOT fun!

Last summer, Mrs. Corn Fed and I decided to take the plunge and look at getting new windows for our master bedroom. For the first two years in our house (our first home!), we put up with random leaks from the corners of our half-circle window in our master bedroom. Not fun.

We had a couple people come out and recaulk the outside of the window, but they couldn't find any other reason for the leaks. Given the fact that the leaks were random in nature, we couldn't help the contractors with any details either!

Where do you get replacement windows?

I started looking around at the big box stores for windows since we've had good luck so far with them for our new storm door and new sliding patio door. Let's just say that big box stores are not the best place for getting replacement windows, at least in our area (upper midwest).

Google saves the day!

A Google Search eventually put me in touch with Renewal by Andersen. You may have heard of Andersen Windows. They're kind of all over! Well, Renewal by Andersen is an in-house brand that handles all the sales, manufacturing, and installation of their windows. This differs from buying actual Andersen windows/doors where you need to hire someone else to install your new windows. The other major difference is that Renewal by Andersen windows fit your existing opening, instead of a complete rip-out to the studs of your wall. (I'm not the best at explaining that!)


Needless to say, we eventually replaced about 10 windows in our house with new fiberglass, double pane windows. Holla!


This was in October, just as things were starting to cool off in the neighborhood.

Savings

We were expecting savings on our heating bill this winter, but we certainly weren't expecting differences like this!


Nov 07, 2013 - Dec 10, 2013 - $96.74
Nov 07, 2014 - Dec 10, 2014 - $85.87

Savings = $10.87


Dec 10, 2013 - Jan 13, 2014 - $147.53
Dec 10, 2014 - Jan 13, 2015 - $108.29

Savings = $39.24

Jan 13, 2014 - Feb 12, 2014 - $154.87
Jan 13, 2015 - Feb 12, 2015 - $77.50

Savings = $80.37

Feb 12, 2014 - Mar 14, 2014 - $139.28
Feb 12, 2015 - Mar 16, 2015 - $80.92

Savings = $58.36

Total savings (4 months) since new windows = $188.84

Not too bad!

Now the cost.

We paid roughly $11,500 for our new windows. As we were low on any savings during this time, we got a home loan from our credit union. We got a 5-year, $15,000 loan, creating monthly payments of roughly $280.

So, with our lower energy usage, we've saved roughly 2/3 of one loan payment in lower heating costs from this year to last year. We also did have the luxury of a more mild winter than last year, but we also were opening our patio door a whole lot more due to our new puppy in December.

Tax Credits

A nice surprise came when it was time to do our taxes this year. I was pleasantly surprised when TurboTax asked me if we made any home improvements to our house during the year. I thought, hell yes we did! Putting in the relevant costs and improvements came back with a tax credit of roughly $315. Applied to our deductions, this helped us avoid any further

The next step in savings is during the summer and seeing how the UV protection and double-pane windows help with our AC bill. Our master bedroom normally gets super hot during the summer as the windows face to the west and get sun from about Noon-9pm during the summer.

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Have you made any energy saving improvements to your home lately? How did they turn out?

Net Worth - February 2015

First, what is net worth and why should I measure it?

Net worth = Total Assets - Total Liabilities

Fairly simple, right?! So, why measure our net worth?

The biggest reason for measure is to not see how much we are worth, but to give us another stick to measure progress against. Is our net worth higher or lower than the previous month?

Step 1: Add up Assets

Using our handy-dandy iPad and Numbers app, I used the built-in Net Worth template to calculate our net worth. While I have already started entering numbers for March, I did the same process for January and February. Here's our numbers so far for March to give you an idea of how the spreadsheet works and looks.

As you can see, Assets are easily calculated by adding up the value of your possessions and more liquid assets (like bank accounts).

Step 2: Add up Liabilities

Our liabilities are fairly easy to add up, as there's only a couple accounts! That debt is quite high! That's why we're doing our budgeting!

Step 3: Calculate Net Worth

While it's really easy to subtract Liabilities from Assets, our Numbers template did the "hard" work for us!

Now you know how it works for us, how have we done so far this year?

With our preliminary numbers from March, we've so far seen an increase of roughly $2,300 in our net worth from February to March.

Most of the increase was driven by contributions and increases in our retirement accounts. While we did remove a bit of debt, the debt needle only moved about $1000 as you can see in the Liabilities row.

Moving forward

Like I mentioned at the beginning, for us measure Net Worth is important because it provides another stick for us to measure ourselves against. We might be so caught up in the daily budgeting and looking at our large debt numbers that we forget the large picture. And in the large picture, we're doing fairly well, considering. Although, we could always do better!

4 Reasons you DON'T need a new computer

If you're in a similar position to where Mrs. Corn Fed and I are, you're probably recently removed from college (say, in the last 10 years) and have been chugging along with the computer you bought during college. If you're a little bit better off, maybe you're chugging along with the computer you bought when you got your first job and your "big" adult paychecks.

Which brings me to my next point: your computer is getting old. Isn't it?

Our was. It was definitely getting long in the tooth.

Most people's reaction to this situation would be to make due with what you have, or to buy a new computer. These were totally our first thoughts. But, they weren't what we decided.

So, why don't you need a new computer?

Reason 1: Your smartphone.

How often do you use your home computer these days? Not often, most likely. Email? Phone. Facebook? Phone. Youtube? Phone.

You might even have a tablet in the house. Now you can watch your Netflix, have a bigger screen for email or other word processing. You don't need to pay for Office on any device, anyway!

Reason 2: You can upgrade. (More than likely.)

Do what we did and spend only 1/10th the cost of a new computer and upgrade your old one! You can make your computer like new without hitting your wallet too hard.

Reason 3: Clean up your computer.

If you've had your computer as long as we did, there is probably a lot of photos, resumes, programs, and other files clogging the hard drive. Back up your files. Then clean your computer up, start from scratch. Erase your hard drives, reinstall your Operating System, and load your files back on the computer.

Now, all that is obviously easier said than done, especially since this is a finance blog and not a tech blog. So, I took the liberty of compiling the best resources on "starting over" for both Windows and Mac computers.

***

MAC:
OS X: How to erase and install (Apple Support)

Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard: How to Erase and Install (Apple Support)

OS X Yosemite: Erase and reinstall OS X (Apple Support)

OS X Mavericks: Erase and reinstall OS X (Apple Support)

OS X Mountain Lion: Erase and reinstall OS X (Apple Support)

OS X Lion: Erase and reinstall Mac OS X (Apple Support)

WINDOWS:
Stop Trying to Clean Your Infected Computer! Just Nuke it and Reinstall Windows (How-to Geek)
Installing and reinstalling Windows 7 (Microsoft Support)

How to perform a clean installation of Windows 8 (Microsoft Support)
***

Reason 4: This is the more drastic route, but it's possible. The library.

Most libraries these days are the technological battle fronts in our communities. They offer Internet access, free computers to use, and our local library even offers tablets to families to borrow!

Yes, it stinks if the library is not convenient for your family, and even more, it stinks that you would need to make a family trip any time you need to use the computer.

But, if you are in a place where you absolutely can't afford a new computer, your local library is probably a good bet.

Make the choice that's right for you and your family.

I'm certainly not advocating NOT getting a new computer if you need/want a new computer. These are merely the same roads that Mrs. Corn Fed and I traveled down when we had to make this decision recently. By not buying a new computer, we saved ourselves over $2000 and a bunch of headaches. Not buying a new computer focused our energies and attention on what truly mattered in our computing lives, and not "wanting" the latest and greatest that we didn't need, or more importantly, couldn't afford.

Is your computer slowing down? What's your family plan on when your computer bites the dust?

Create a Money Date in 5 Simple Steps

Maybe you've heard of a "money date" before, and maybe not. I'd like to set the stage for you and show a little bit of what our world looked like before we discovered the incredible money date.

Our world before "money dates" meant our date nights - and I mean real dates, dinner, movie, romance - usually had some money component to the date. By that, I mean that at some point during the date, I'm sure one of us would bring up one version of the following statements:

"Where does the checking account stand?" 

"Hey, how much can we afford for our honeymoon?" 

"Could we do this excursion?" 

"I was thinking about our next vacation, do we have the money?"

And then our romantic date becomes a heated conversation about what each of us are doing wrong with money, getting frustrated that the other person doesn't understand us.

We're not exactly sure how we learned or heard about the idea of "money dates," but the basic idea is pretty simple.

Set aside time in your schedule to talk about money. A money date.

Now, the best result you can get from this is pretty wonderful. Not only do you get a better understanding of your finances, but you get your date nights back! Double huzzah!

So, how do you go about starting money dates?

It's pretty simple.

Set a time.

Originally, we tried to do our money dates once a month. It would work okay for a couple months, then we would let it slide until something bad happened. Then we would have money dates again, let it slide. You get the idea.

Our money dates work a lot better now that both of us regularly (semi-weekly, if not daily) check our bank accounts and see what we've spent. We've gone to a semi-monthly schedule for our money dates, meeting around the times we get paid, the middle and end of each month.

Gather any resources.

Like in our work lives, we all hate meetings where people aren't prepared! Money dates are the same. Make sure you come to the table (or couch, coffee shop) with the information you need to have a good conversation. Is this a list of transactions for the time in-between money dates? Maybe it's the amount of money in each of your accounts, including any debt. Do you have a calendar of when bills are due or scheduled to be paid? These are all things you can bring to your money date.

Stick to the plan.

Respect each other and the money date. If you say that you're going to talk about only one or two items, focus on finishing your discussion on those first before moving to other potential items. We've had one-too-many money dates derailed by heading down a different road than what we planned. Likewise, if you've both agreed to talk for an hour, respect that decision. If you can get done quicker, that's better!

Review.

At the end of the money date, quickly go over any decisions made during your meeting. Did you decide to change your automatic savings plan? Change it. Did you change your budget around for next month? Change it. Need to put a new bill in the calendar? Put it on the calendar. The worst part of this journey is getting to the next money date realizing you didn't do what you, or your partner, said you were going to do.

Change for the better.

Money dates have made the financial part of our lives infinitely better. It's a safe place where we discuss money. We don't judge each other for decisions made during the in-between time. We realize that we are two partners on this journey together and these meetings are meant to help us succeed in that journey.

What say you? Do you have money dates? Do you have fun names for them?

To buy a new computer or upgrade?

Back when Mrs. Corn Fed and I were engaged, we jumped into the deep end of making big purchases.

Not our computer, but you get the idea!

We decided to purchase a brand new MacBook Pro, which cost us about $2500. Using that new computer, we designed a lot of materials for our wedding.

• Save the Date Invites
• Dinner Menus
• Wedding Programs
• Reception Highlight Video

Our thought at the time was we would be paying people do these things, but we already had the training and acumen to accomplish these on our own.

Fast forward almost 5 years later

We were now faced with a growing conundrum: an aging computer. It was no longer easy to edit video, use Photoshop, and edit complex HTML. In fact, even simple web browsing and Word documents took forever and were exercises in dealing with frustration. 

So, what were our needs?

Replace existing functionality

We soon realized that the functionality we needed was for three main areas:

• web surfing, 
• email, and 
• word processing. 

With those three items in mind, we realized that we didn't need a new +$2500 MacBook Pro to meet those "99% of the time" needs.

Our buying options came down to three areas:

1. Buy an iPad (with possibly a keyboard)
2. Upgrade our existing computer. Possibly new hard drives, etc.
3. Buy a cheaper Windows laptop.

Off the bat, #3 was never really an option. Our existing software is all Mac-based. On top of that, we have two Apple TVs, one 1st Generation iPad, and two iPhones already in the house; staying in the same ecosystem was preferable. This isn't to say we were against Windows computers. We only wanted something that would work with the software and hardware we already had at home.

Is upgrading a possibility?

I started looking at what it would take to upgrade our computer, and the best bang for our buck came in two places: upgrade to a solid state drive, and upgrade the RAM. We ended up purchasing two SSDs from OWC and installing those in our 2010 MacBook Pro. After the installation of the drives, I then installed the newest operating system, Yosemite, on the laptop. 

What a difference those two items made! And at such a low cost compared to the cost of a new computer. We ended up spending about 1/10th of what a new MacBook Pro would cost, and it feels like we have a brand new computer. And this didn't affect our personal finances as we paid for the upgrade from our separate business account. Double score!

Alright, so what happened to option #1?

Well, we couldn't join my family in England for Christmas because of our finances, so we got another present from my parents, a new iPad for Mrs. Corn Fed. We researched and tested keyboard cases and ended up with a wonderful ZAGG Folio case.

Where do we stand several months after these purchases and upgrades?

Oh, we stand on pretty good ground!

Mrs. Corn Fed loves the new iPad for work and pleasure, having taken it on both vacation and work trips.

Me? I love the upgraded computer, its speed, and increased functionality brought by the upgrade to Yosemite and newer software.

---

What about you? How have you approached replacing an aging computer? Is your phone the main computer in your family now?

Losing your debit card

The other night, I left my debit card behind at a restaurant.

What to do when you leave your debit card at a restaurant?

Continue to drive home, of course.

Park in the driveway, stew, get upset.

Listen to Mrs. Corn Fed tell you, "Call the restaurant, tell them you left it, and see if you can still pick it up tonight."

Watch Mrs. Corn Fed walk into the house.

Sit in the driveway, continue to be upset.

Call Restaurant.

Tell Mrs. CF restaurant has debit card.

Leave to go pick up debit card.

Arrive at restaurant, park right at door, no care of actual parking spots.

Get debit card from restaurant.

Text Mrs. CF, "got it".

Drive home. Calm down.

Get home.

Go to sleep.

Wake up.

Be grateful.

Write blog post about whole situation.

---

Have you left your debit card behind? What did you do? Do you plan or panic?

January 2015 Expenditures

The start of our new journey.

As I wrote in our first post, January was the first month that we started our budget and started keeping  track of our expenses. I've been reading Frugalwoods and was inspired to write our January 2015 Expenditure report because of them!

Goals.

Our immediate goals are simple:

1. Pay down our $12,000 in credit card debt.
2. Increase our Emergency Savings from $100 to $1000. Longer term, we'd like to increase this to 6 months of our salaries.
3. Save for our vacation in November ($1000-$1500).
4. Save for a possible down payment on a new car ($2000-$2500). I'd like to push this out further, but Mrs. Corn Fed prefers newer, lower maintenance vehicles.

Keeping track and staying positive.

The important thing for us to remember this month is that we are only beginning this journey. We aren't going to pay everything off at once. Our focus is to learn where we are spending our money, and to adhere to the budget that we set.

So, let's see how we did this month!

Heat/Gas/Electricity/Utilities: $97.79

Pretty good month for this. Except. When we got our February bill, we hadn't paid our electricity bill. Since we're on budget billing, we were forgiven the one month, so no extra fees. But that will make our February bill twice as much, and obviously lowered this month's total. Good news is that we recently got new windows and we're already seeing lower heating bills compared to the previous winter. Bad news is that we got new windows.

Internet/Netflix/Cable: $137.08

Internet and Netflix are the small part of this. Combined they make about $60 of this line item. We switched from our local cable provider to DirecTv about a year ago, so our rates recently rose to a bit over $100 a month. We're in a two year contract, so we're "stuck" for now with this cost. Things are obviously moving towards a future where we could get the majority of our shows without cable/satellite, but we're not there (or ready) yet.

Cell Phones: $146.46

This is for our two iPhones and our 4GB/month data plan. Because we started to track our expenses this month, we were looking for places to save money and this was one area that we were able to make a quick and immediate change. Verizon recently dropped their prices $10/month. We took advantage of that, plus I looked at our average data usage. For the past six months, we've averaged less than 2GB/month by a decent amount. (see below)

Because of this, I switched our plan to 2GB per month. Combined these two changes will save us about $25 a month starting in February.

Auto: $132.31

Our normal line item for this includes our auto payment, but we don't have to pay that for January and February — we got an extra Christmas present that took care of this for two months. My wife had to tow her car and get a new battery around New Years Day, so that's what this amount is for this month.

Car Insurance: $114.78

Like our utility bill, we were a little late on our car insurance bill for December, so we ended up having two car insurance payments go through in January. I did go in and adjust the mileage for our insurance, but that will only lower the monthly bill about $3-4 starting in February.

Window Loan: $281.40

In October, we needed to replace the windows of our house. Total bill was over $11,000, so we needed to take out a home equity loan. This is our monthly payment for the next 56 months or so. Ugh.

Cleaning Lady: $0.00

Last year, Mrs. Corn Fed hurt her back, so to keep up with chores we hired someone to come clean our house every two weeks. We had her come two times in January, but she didn't cash the checks until February. Double ugh.

Web Hosting / Adobe: $49.24

We have a couple of other websites (that I won't list for privacy reasons, right now), and also our Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. I moved one of our sites to cheaper hosting, saving us roughly $20/month starting in February. As part of our side hustle, we'll keep the Adobe CC for now.

Fitness: $11.00

This included my monthly subscription to DailyBurn, which I dropped during January as part of our budgeting process. The other dollar was for Mrs. Corn Fed to rent cycle shoes at her spin class.

Petsitter: $170.00

We recently got a new puppy. Since she can't stay in the kennel all day, and we both work about 30 minutes away from home, we hired a petsitter to let the puppy out during lunch. We got a good deal and this will cost $10/day, which is much cheaper than our previous petsitter. We're already cutting back on this in February, so we should see lower expenses here next month.

Medicine / Therapist: $52.98

This is mainly for me, Mr. Corn Fed. I've been seeing a therapist for clinical depression and I'm also on medication for that. Thankfully, both are fully covered by insurance, so these are just copays for my medicine and therapy visits. This will continue for the foreseeable future, so not much we can do for expenses here.

Groceries: $717.30

Really have no idea how this happened. That's probably why we're doing the expense tracking! We set our original budget for $300, adjusted to $400 about halfway through the month, and still blew past that by a long shot. Need to fix this for February — big time.

Takeout: $133.99

This is our budget for work lunches, happy hour, things like that. We had been doing multiple lunches out during the week and it was probably adding up to a good bit. This will help us keep track of it and see if we, or how we can cut back and adjust.

Date Nights: $130.27

Mrs. Corn Fed loves date nights! Dinners, movies, movies, and more movies! We did a lot more nights in this month, so a few delivery pizzas and rental movies rather than nice dinners out. We'll see how we adjust our date nights to fit our budgeting and our goals of eliminating our debt.

Clothing / Makeup: $194.46

We adjusted this category in February to better reflect how we were spending the money. In January, this category actually consisted of one massage (for Mrs. Corn Fed's continued back issues) and two hair cuts (one for each of us).

Dog Expenses: $316.49

Like I mentioned above, there's a new Corn Fed Hound in the family! We've had normal puppy vet check ups and shots in January. Additionally, we had one visit for our older Corn Fed Hound Senior. We have a few more visits on the schedule for February, March, and then May. So, we'll make sure to keep this category budgeted well to account for those foreseen expenses.

Gas: $192.75

We did some traveling to Mr. Corn Fed's parents this month, and to Mrs. Corn Fed's extended family. But other than that, this mainly includes our normal commuting gas.

Other: $115.35

Now that I've been reading up on other people's expense reports, I don't like the "other" category that much! I understand Mrs. Corn Fed's angst towards the "other" designation! Hard to budget for something you don't know about! Looking back, this included Overdraft Fees, parking fees, and a coffee for Mr. Corn Fed's mom.

A main focus of ours in our budgeting is increasing our savings, and paying down our debt. We've made sure to include these in our monthly budget so we don't use the "we'll use whatever is leftover" method, which doesn't work for us.

As you can see, we did good for both our "Car and Travel" account and paying down more than we budgeted for the credit card. We weren't able to contribute anything to our emergency savings, and only $50 to our Home account (to pay for long-term budgeted house expenses, like a fence).

While our travel fund is highly important, I wonder if we could lower our budget for the emergency fund to more quickly pay off our credit card. Even if we only did $100/month in our emergency fund, at the end of year, we'd have over $1200 in that account, which is a lot better than we have now.

So how did we do overall?

We were pretty close! 

The biggest area where can improve from January was our grocery bill. We were over twice our original estimate, and about 40% over our revised estimate. Yikes!

We've made some small adjustments in our Stationary Bills. This will allow us to focus more on those "flexible" areas like groceries and entertainment. Once we lower the Stationary Bills, we can "set it and forget it!" 

Frugalwoods Method of Non-Mortgage Spending.

$3,538.65.

That was our non-mortgage spending for the month of January. Crazy to see that number! Seems small for us, but large in comparison to the awesome Frugalwoods! It'll be fun to see that go down, hopefully, in February!

So that's our January! How did yours go? Were you happy or surprised by the first month of 2015?

Our Journey Has Begun

Long story.

We don't know how we got here.

Over the Christmas holidays, Mrs. Corn Fed and I sat down to look at our bank accounts. We were quite surprised by what we saw. We had over $12,000 on our bank credit card!

Now to explain a bit about how we got here.

Right or wrong, I've only been paying bills using the iOS app for my bank. Bill comes in the mail, or email, I log in, type the amount owed, and pay the bill. For the credit card, I think that I had set up autopay for the minimum payment so that we were never late.

Credit Card Debt: $12,325.80

Mrs. Corn Fed decided that we'll set up a budget and keep track of our expenses. So, she used Numbers on the iPad and there was a built-in budget template! We spent a couple hours putting in our regular expenses and felt that we were in a good place to get started.

January went fairly well budget-wise. We ended up over by about $159 on our expense budget of $4460. This already did include money to our Emergency Fund and the Credit Card Debt (i.e. we are budgeting savings and debt as expenses.)

For February, we looked where we could make some changes.

Verizon changed their pricing, reducing their prices $10 per month. I also looked at how much data we were using and adjusted our plans accordingly.

Savings: $24 per month

We cut our cleaning lady. We had originally picked her up because Mrs. Corn Fed hurt her back last year and we needed help around the house. We got better, but still kept the help for our sanity. We went one month with just one visit, but decided to cut the expense entirely in February.

Savings: $70 per month

I also changed some of our existing web hosting to less expensive options. GoDaddy had a $1/month sale on Managed Wordpress, so I migrated my blog/website to that hosting.

Savings: $19 per month

Mrs. Corn Fed canceled her subscription to People. I canceled my subscription to Sports Illustrated.

Savings: $170~ per year.

In addition, we changed the payment dates for our mortgage in order to better coincide with when we got paid. We were running out of money in our checking account and were getting overdraft fees several times a month.

Savings: $15 per month.

Total Savings: Roughly $140 per month.

So right there, without even changing any of our spending habits, we almost made up the spending difference from January. We're expecting March to be a much better month than January!

Where does our Credit Card Debt stand today?

Credit Card Debt: $12,305.17 (-$20.63)

It would have been nice to make a bigger dent in our credit card bill, but we were only able to pay a little bit more than the minimum in January. Therefore, the interest charges ate up most of our payments! Ugh!

I'll try to write a post about our net worth next. Because we're really not struggling over all. We made this mistake and now we need to fix it. We're not in danger of losing anything, but it'd be nice to not have this much debt hanging over our heads!