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?