Did you notice that the title of my monthly report is now “Budget Report” instead of “Debt Repayment Progress Report.” I’m pretty excited about that. If nothing else, it’s a shorter title!
Even with our debt paid off, I’ll still be sharing with you all our monthly earning and spending. It really does keep me accountable. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve avoided a purchase because I thought “I don’t want to have to tell my readers about this!” We’re committed to transparency here as we make personal finance public.
Speaking of transparency, I added a new series to the blog in August called Frugal Feats, Flops, and Funnies. Each Friday (well, except for days like today when a monthly update falls on a Friday), I’ll be sharing details of my frugal adventures during the past week. I’d love to have you share your own frugal feats, flops and funnies in the comments, too, so we can laugh and learn together. If you had some in mind for today, just save them for next week. I’ll be excited to hear them.
Okay friends! Moving on to the numbers
Savings Goal
Now that we’re done paying of our debt, which totaled a whopping $144,000, we are working toward some new goals. Initially, we have some intermediate goals totaling $33,000 that address things we’ve while on our crazy-focused debt payoff adventure, like saving for vehicle replacements, putting money toward retirement and taking advantage of tax-reduction strategies (more on that here). You can read about our pre-house goals in detail here. We want to knock these goals out before the end of the year.
We starting saving toward these goals in July after making our final debt payment and paying for our family debt-free reward (you can see our reward at the bottom of July’s report). This month we put an additional $6,278 into our pre-house goal fund, which brings our total to $8,673, or 26% percent of our goal.
Income
Our total net income for August was $9,509. Since we live on last month’s income, this is income that we haven’t used yet. We will be budgeting and spending it in September.
Attorney Income (Day Job)– $5,141 Mr. SixFiguresUnder has been working full-time as an attorney for the state of California since the fall of 2015. His actual take-home pay is $3,778, but I add back in the cost of the benefits (insurance, dental, vision, parking, union dues and retirement) that are automatically taken out of his check so that I can show them to you in our budget below.
Attorney Income (Private Practice)– $1,837 On top of working full-time (and a three-hour round-trip commute), my husband has his own private law practice on the side. He will go back to working just one job in the future, but hasn’t decided exactly how it will be arranged. His practice paid some annual business expenses this month, which reduced the profit distribution, and he’s behind on collecting on bills again, one of the struggles of doing everything solo. Hopefully next month this will be up again.
My Income (Blog)– $2,531 The income that I report is the income that I received this month minus all of my blogging expenses. Well, all of my expenses except taxes. We will deal with that one later (and it’s going to be painful).
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Spending
Each month we budget down to zero using last month’s income. Our spending in August came from the income we earned in July. In addition to the savings goal above, here’s how we spent money in August:
Tithing– $993 We happily pay a 10% tithe on our total income from the previous month. You can read more about why we paid tithing even when we were in debt.
Other Giving– $120 Other charitable donations this month.
Mortgage/Rent– $0 Living in my in-laws’ unfinished basement is a huge blessing. I don’t expect everyone to do what we do, but for us, it’s worth sacrificing some comforts and privacy to pay off our debt faster. If you are considering living with family, here are some things to consider.
Internet– $0 Thanks to some legal work that my husband did for our service provider, we will have free internet for a while. It’s nice to stretch our budget by bartering, though we will still pay income tax on the fair market value of Internet service at tax time next year.
Republic Wireless Cell Phones– $30 We’ve been using Republic Wireless as our cell phone carrier for over two years now. This includes both my husband’s phone and mine, along with the taxes. If your cell phone bill is killing you, I definitely recommend that you check them out!.
Health Insurance– $739 We have insurance through my husband’s employer. This is the portion of the insurance premium that his employer does not cover. It includes dental and vision insurance premiums too. The portion that comes out of his paycheck will be going down next month.
Car Insurance– $107 We insure two older vehicles (both 1997). Our auto insurance at USAA is great. In addition to the wonderful coverage, they also give us dividends at the end of the year, which is always a nice treat.
Renters Insurance– $14 Our renters insurance is also through USAA. It doesn’t cost much and it’s really great to have when you need it, like when my husband’s car was broken into a couple of years ago. Car insurance covered the car damage and vehicle related items, but it was our renters insurance that covered his personal property.
Food– $417 I obviously struggled with the grocery budget this month, but honestly I didn’t know it until the end. I had gotten lazy at entering the grocery transactions in YNAB and trusted my brain to track my spending. This is why you need to track your expenses, because you’ll go $100 over your grocery budget without even realizing it. Had I been entering my transactions like a good girl, I would have known when to stop! 🙂
If you are struggling to get your grocery budget down, I definitely recommend the Grocery Budget Makeover. It’s only available a couple of times a year, but one of them happens to be now!
Gas– $361 While this gas budget might look outrageous to some, it actually makes me smile. When I started Six Figures Under gas prices were much higher and some months we were over $500. I like this range better. Gas around here is around $2.39 per gallon.
Parking– $155 Working downtown means paying for parking. It comes straight out of my husband’s paycheck, which means it is paid for with pre-tax dollars, a small consolation I suppose.
Clothing– $105 This is mostly due to buying new shoes for all the kids before the new school year.
Household– $66 I purchased school supplies, toiletries, sandwich bags, and a few other miscellaneous household necessities.
Entertainment– $6 We watched several movies on VidAngel and grabbed a Redbox once.
Car Repair– $17 My husband got a new headlight for his car on Amazon and replaced it himself. The story of the busted headlight was what sparked this frugal funny.
Car Registration/Smog– $50 Well we didn’t quite make it to the registration because Mr. SixFiguresUnder’s car didn’t pass smog on the first attempt. He has an appointment to get the car fixed next week. At that point he can do a free smog re-test, then finally get his car registered. (More on this here).
Medical– $15 A standard co-pay for a doctor visit.
Retirement– $484 With my husband’s state job, this amount comes directly out of his paycheck and into his state retirement. While we have some retirement savings from before law school, it’s nice to be contributing again.
College Savings– $100 We contribute $25 per month per child to 529 accounts. More on our decision to start saving for college in this post.
And that pretty much covers our finances in August. We’re happy to be making progress toward our pre-house goals, but, as anyone who is working hard toward a goal knows, it never seems to go fast enough. We’re still looking at houses, dreaming, and trying to be patient (and getting a little sick thinking about how much of a down payment we’re going to need).
How About You?
- I’d love to hear about how your budget and/or debt repayment went in August!
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My boyfriend and I recently got engaged and have been starting the process of thinking about where we’d like to have a house. These two expenses alone are big ones and the timing couldn’t have been more in sync.
We have been trying to put away for a down payment but so far it’s not going well, it will take us a while before we’ll be getting a house.
The average wedding here costs $65,000. My husband and I don’t like weddings (we joke that we only went to our own because marriage-by-proxy is no longer legal – and even then we eloped, which, btw, I highly recommend) so feel free to completely and totally ignore this advice. But this is what he said recently to a coworker who is planning her wedding, and I think it’s great advice for people who actually want to do the whole wedding thing: The wedding is for you and your fiance. People are there because they love the two of you. For your guests, it’s not going to be their most memorable night ever; it’s not going to be the best meal they’ve ever had or the best live music they’ve ever listened to. So don’t worry about impressing them; just have the sort of party you want to have.
I killed my laptop a few months ago by spilling tea on it (sob) and I had my Excel spending spreadsheet on it. Of course, I had not backed it up to my Dropbox or OneDrive. I was admittedly very lazy about restarting a new one, and started getting too spendy with entertainment expenses this summer. I always get too spendy when I don’t track. I have to keep things tight the next few months to hit my Roth goal, so I finally restarted my spreadsheet on September 1st. If I didn’t use cash for my grocery budget, I would no doubt have gone off the rails with that one too.
Wow great augmentation of income! I love side businesses such as a blog or a private practice. Can’t depend on the employer at all these days to be loyal in return for your loyalty. You are killing it and here’s to your continued success.
We’ve been quite good at investing this year, and have set a goal of saving a bit more to invest by the end of this year – these are long-term investments we don’t intend to touch for a good 15 – 20 years. Then I want to start saving for our kitchen remodel, which is long overdue. We don’t even have matching cupboards in our kitchen; I’ve painted them so they all match, but they are from 6 different kitchens. (The person who built this house believed in recycling, which is great for things like 100+ year old brick walls, but not so great for kitchen cabinets – some are wood, some are laminate, some are shaker style, some are modern; it’s a mess.)
Wow! That sounds outrageous! A kitchen remodel sounds exciting!
The house I grew up in was built in the 1920s and has some eccentricities too. Like upstairs there is a sound board and other wood salvaged from a piano as part of a wall.
I’m so glad to see a “savings” report – it must feel great to put that money toward something that YOU want to save for! And way to go on staying frugal even though you have a lot of free money that others would easily justify spending :).
A quick question – where do you buy your kids’ shoes? I just ask because we have 4 kids as well and the cost of new shoes adds up quickly. I don’t mind spending less as long as the shoes are of decent quality.
We made the same regular payment toward our debt and are still over $70K away from paying it off, but my husband got a small raise that recently kicked in, so we will soon put a little more in each month. He also found out that he got a job within his office that he applied for, and while it won’t result in an immediate raise, HR said there’s a possibility of a raise at the beginning of next year!
So up until recently I’ve had pretty good success at finding quality used shoes for my kids. Last year, my daughter needed tennis shoes and we got a pair from Walmart that didn’t last long at all! Not even the entire school year (she still wore them, but they were in sad, sad shape). This year, we went to the Nike outlet and spent a little more than we had planned, but hopefully they will last longer!
You can actually find some decent quality, good brand shoes at places like Savers, if you can believe it. You have to hunt but you can find high end brands there that are in great shape. Give it a shot!
I like the pre-house goals thermometer! Rather like the one’s that you see on church noticeboards this side of the pond showing how much more is needed to repair the church roof!
But when we were saving many years ago now, I followed an idea that my cousin had. She drew a house and then divided the amount they needed by the number of slates (shingles) on the roof. They coloured in the shingle in a bright colour when that amount was achieved. The drawing was pinned to the wall where the whole family could see it each day. It was a great motivation.
That’s fun that you mention the house visual because I drew one for us about a month ago! After our pre-house goals are done and we’ve decided how much to save for a down payment, we’ll get started on it! 🙂
I made a paper chain to help us save for a 16 day trip to Hawaii. Every time we put $50 towards the trip, my son got to remove one link……it was a good visual and a fabulous trip!!