You may have noticed I’ve been a little off my normal schedule these past couple of weeks, so posts aren’t on their normal days. Thanks for your patience while I get my ducks back in a row!
Debt Repayment
This month we paid $1340 toward debt. This was smaller than we had hoped because our expenses this month included the cost to replace the items stolen from my husband’s car. We hope to receive a substantial reimbursement from the insurance company soon, so next month’s debt repayment will be higher.
For those of you curious about what happened last month with our debt, we’re right there with you. Last month we paid $1762 toward debt, but our debt totals only went down $14. Super disappointing! My husband called the federal loan servicer and talked to someone in the call center who didn’t have a clue. He has sent off two written inquiries as well. We’ll see what happens. We suspect it has to do with what one reader suggested, that when we were off IBR for part of a month (see last month’s update for that drama) the interest capitalized and became payable as part of the total loan amount. For now, we’ll wait for a response.
Income
Our total net income for July was: $4490 For those who are new here, this is income that won’t be spent until August since we live on the last month’s income.
Regular Income: $2969– This is Mr.SixFiguresUnder’s current take-home pay. For more details about his pay see here or here.
Etsy Income: $516 –My Etsy shop kept me about as busy as I can handle being this month. It’s kind of crazy how there will be a slow week and then a crazy one right after it.
Blog Income: $1005– In my blog income total, I include referral credit that goes directly toward budget items. A big thank you to those of you who signed up for Republic Wireless after reading my experience and review. We love our phones and our phone plan, and many of you have joined us now. While it’s not cash income, the referral credit will cover our cell phone bill for a good while.
Spending
Each month we budget down to zero using last month’s income. Our spending in August comes from the income we earned in July. In addition to the debt payments above, here’s how we spent money in August:
Tithing–$439 One of the expenses that we never cut out of our budget is a 10% tithe on our income.
Mortgage/Rent– $0 My in-laws are wonderful and allow us to live in their basement in rent-free. It’s a huge blessing with some great benefits.
Utilities– $0 Our utilities are included in our “rent.” We do pay $30/month for extra Internet bandwidth (our Internet options in the boonies are few and expensive), but that comes out as an expense from blogging income, which is deducted before it gets to our family budget.
Republic Wireless– $213 In August, we got our 2nd Republic wireless phone after our successful trial. We are on the $10/month plan. In future months I’ll continue to include the cost of our monthly plan here even though it’s actually covered by the referral service credit I mentioned under our income.
Health Insurance– $114 This is through our ACA plan. You can read the details here.
Car Insurance– $97 It’s kind of fun that the insurance for our two ’97 vehicles is $97.
Renters Insurance– $14 I haven’t included this in our budget here before, because last year we prepaid for a year. I thought it was ironic, that it renewed (and thus, was added to the budget) just a few days before my husband’s car was broken into. We are grateful to have this coverage!
Food– $255 Summer months make it easier to keep the grocery budget low because we’re getting produce from the garden and fruit from the trees. We even went to In-N-Out this month when we were out as a family and weren’t going to be home before we all turned into hungry monsters (and cheeseburgers sounded really good)! It was pretty funny because the kids were all confused about this strange change in our normal eating habits.
Gas– $520 Because we live rent-free in the boonies, gas is one of our biggest expenses. We are usually just under $500, but this month we met some friends for a long weekend camping trip that was 5 hours away from home, so we had an extra 10 hours of driving.
Clothing– $22 We made a trip to my favorite thrift store! They tag their items with colors and assign a discount to each color of 25%, 50%, and 75% off. We went on the first day after the new discounts had been assigned, so there was still inventory available at great prices. We got lots of great clothes and shoes for the kids (and a $3 pair of almost-new dress shoes for my husband) for $22. I also got a few free things for myself by signing up for two gently used designer clothes websites: Twice and ThreadFlip. Twice gives you $10 credit and ThreadFlip gives you $5 when you sign up through a friend’s link (yep friends, those are my links there). Twice had a free shipping code that I used and ThreadFlip always has free shipping. Twice is more reasonably priced and you can filter search results to start with the lowest price, which is my style. I love it when I can get something totally for free and try out a new website as well.
Household– $42 This month we bought a second booster car seat for my kindergartner so that we can have one in Grandpa’s car. Grandpa drops my two older kiddos off at school on his way into work. We also bought shampoo, trash bags, and school supplies.
Fun– $12 We had lots of free fun camping, hiking, and visiting the ocean. I bought a couple things at a thrift store when we were out of town. From my notes it looks like they were clothing items, but I categorized the shopping as fun, so it must have been a blast! I also spent $5 at Wal-mart that apparently qualified as “fun.”
Lawyer Marketing– $177 We are now done with our year-long contract to put an ad in a local publication. Next month this expense will be reduced, or we’ll at least be spending on something useful instead.
Law Practice– $44 Monthly subscription to my husband’s law practice management software.
Car Registration– $89 The van registration was renewed in August. Thankfully it’s an off-year, so it didn’t need a smog test.
Car Maintenance– $0 Remember how the van was going to need nearly $500 of work (but that paled in comparison to my husband’s bad news)? Well that will be done in September. They had to order a part, and we had to catch our breath after dealing with replacing all of my husband’s things that were stolen.
Emergency Fund– $0 We were hoping to add another $200 to our emergency fund, but we put that money straight toward our bad day drama instead. The emergency fund should just feel happy that we didn’t touch it at all when handling this month’s drama. Instead, I made a budget category “replacing stolen stuff” and used funds from our regular budget that would otherwise have gone to debt repayment. We look forward to reimbursement from the insurance company.
Note: Some links in this post are affiliate links. For more info check out my disclosure page.
How did your finances go in July?
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You have a great blog, it’s obvious you put a lot of hard work into it. I admire the things you are doing. I have a question and I don’t want it to sound nasty but I suppose it will. In the “Our Story” section you write that your husband could be making a 6 figure salary but for quality of life issues he chooses to work a less demanding job. That’s great, I admire you for that. But then you accept a $1000+ per month taxpayer funded ACA subsidy?
Hi Lora! Thanks for your kind words. I don’t mind your question.
I don’t know if you’ve read our detailed explanation about how the ACA affected our insurance situation or not, but in short, we would prefer to not be a burden on taxpayers. We were perfectly happy with our pre-ACA plan. We paid completely out of pocket for our $453/month premium (no work contributions). We were happy having a high deductible because we are healthy and don’t use insurance very much. The ACA deemed our high deductible plans as substandard and we had to choose one of their plans. Ironically our high deductible plan was affordable and the ACA plans were anything but affordable. If we had the option, we would happily be responsible for our own insurance like we did before 2014. As our income increases, the subsidy will decrease. We will be more than happy for that to happen and we are working hard to make it happen as soon as possible!
For what it’s worth, it turns out that building your own business isn’t really less demanding than classic post-law-school jobs, it just pays a lot less starting out. My husband still works many 12+ hour days where he’s gone before the kids wake up and home long after they’re asleep. We’re not taking the easy way out by any means. 🙂
Love this post. Debt repayment is something we’re going to be working on for the next few years, too. By the way, I wanted to let you know that your link to Twice isn’t working. I’ll be checking out those sites!
Thanks for the heads-up Donella! I was wondering why more people were signing up for ThreadFlip, when Twice not only gives more credit, but is more reasonably priced. It’s fixed now!
Found your blog not too long ago and am checking in periodically for updates. You have a big goal and I think like most of your readership, I’m really curious if you’ll be able to pull it off (and I don’t mean that in a mean way, I just mean from a mathematical logistics standpoint).
The blog income is great and I’m really happy to see that increasing the amount of money coming into your household.
Keeping the tithing is admirable when you think how much that is really costing you (not only lowering the principal, but the amount of interest it would reduce as well). It can be tough to stick to your guns when most people would disagree with it. As inactive LDS myself, I totally know where you’re coming from.
Too bad to see debt only went down $14 even with substantial payments.. hopefully you can get that sorted out quickly!
Hi Bridget! Thanks for checking in. I’m curious to see how our goal will turn out too! We set it high and it’s keeping us working hard! We’re definitely appreciating the growing blog income.
We have honestly never thought twice about paying tithing. I’ve had readers question it, some even outraged, but we would never consider not paying it. It is the first line of our monthly budget and the category that gets funded first. I know that sounds crazy to a lot of people, especially given our tight budget and lofty goal. I’ll be explaining more in an upcoming post.
I love reading your blog! Thank you for such honest updates.
Thanks for the kind words Karen! 🙂
Hi Stephanie. It was interesting to see some changes in your budget categories this month. Isn’t it funny how life gets in the way right when we finally think we are ahead? We DEFINITELY also had some unexpected expenses in August as I will outline below.
July Income (That we live off of in August): $7724.47. This included the first month of two full incomes, WHOOHOOO, in six months, AND an unexpected bonus! This also includes half.com and ebay sales.
July Expenses:
Monthly Bills- $1724.73 This includes rent, insurance, cable/internet, cellphones, utilites, financial payments, and gym membership. Our gym membership had a yearly $24 service fee attached to upgrade equipment. Our cable bill went down $50. I negotiated with the cellphone company for a lower rate in August that wont appear until September. Also we changed insurance around in August so that monthly amount will probably go up.
Everyday Expenses- $2824.74 This includes grocery, dining, household goods, dog food, and treats, personal care, work expenses, gas, etc. The two big expenses this month were clothing and workout supplements. There was a BOGO sale on our normal workout supplements so we spent an unusual amount of money on them this month in the hopes that we wont buy any for 3-4 months while we start a sinking fund. I needed some new work shirts and that was an unexpected expense that I covered this month as well. Our grocery bill was also higher than normal from hosting two birthday celebrations at our home (which saved the money from eating out)
We put the remaining $3175 in slush funds and long term savings ( vet bills, doctors bills, future house purchase, and a future car purchase)
Fortunately, we have decided to put the purchase of a house in front of my husbands continuing education goals, for now. The reason we decided this is because after months of fighting with the credit score people we FINALLY have all inaccuracies fixed and we want to strike while everything is ok BEFORE we get into (possibly) more debt for school. After we are settled into the home, in 1-2 years, my husband will go back to school for his masters.
Hooray for two full-time incomes and a bonus! Great job negotiating down some bills and having lots of money in your slush fund. That’s great that your husband is willing to be flexible with his education. Saving for and buying a house will be so exciting for you two!! Congrats!!
Hi, your blog is such an inspiration, I love reading it and have referred it to other people as well. I personally don’t have debt, except for a mortgage, but I volunteer for an organization that helps people with debt. And even though their situation is always very different from yours (I live in Europe), they can still relate to your stories and find something useful in it.
So thank you for writing so honestly and wonderfully and please keep going!
Love from Holland!
Hi Shelley! Congrats on staying our of debt! Thanks for sharing my blog with the people you work with in Holland! I’m glad it’s inspirational for you and others! 🙂
What the heck is a smog test?
I live in Reno, Nevada and it is a test to make sure your car is functioning properly, aka, not emitting too many fumes (smog). I am assuming where Stephanie lives it’s the same thing.
It’s an emissions test that’s required in California. It costs something like $65 for the test. If your car doesn’t pass, you have to make the necessary repairs for your car to pass. Once it passes, you can register or re-register your car.
Wow! I agree with the poster before me. Your food budget is amazing! I’m going to stalk your posts and see if I can find something on how you keep it so low!
Thanks Jen. I’ve written a few posts about keeping our grocery costs down, but I’ll have some more in the near future. Until then you can read:
–Stocking Up on Food: Why We Do It and How We Save Money
–Saving on Groceries Without Using Coupons
–How Menu Planning Saves Money
Great job on the debt repayment despite all if the emergency expenses! And awesome job on the food budget, I’m always amazed at how much you are able to spread your food money. It’s inspired me to reassess our grocery bills for savings.
Thanks Judi! I will be posting more in the near future about how we keep our grocery costs down.