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:- Pay down our $12,000 in credit card debt.
- Increase our Emergency Savings from $100 to $1000. Longer term, we'd like to increase this to 6 months of our salaries.
- Save for our vacation in November ($1000-$1500).
- 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!
