I’ve been a little quiet around here because I’ve been crazy busy homeschooling my 4 older kiddos (K-7). I definitely underestimated the time and energy it would take, but overall it is going well.
But you know me well enough to know that even when life is busy, we still take time to keep a budget and manage our money. We do it because we have goals! We know that if we don’t make a plan for our money it will disappear and we won’t know what happened to it. Plus, we love making progress toward our goals.
You probably also know that I’m a big fan of the month-ahead budget using YNAB, but I will readily admit that it’s not THE only way to have a successful budget! While I’ve heard from so many readers and subscribers that they have also fallen head-over-heels for month-ahead budgeting, there are lots of ways to create and stick to a budget.
If what you’ve tried in the past hasn’t worked, don’t give up. It might take multiple tries and experimenting with multiple techniques before you get in your budgeting groove and figure out what really works for you.
I’m all about sharing with you what works for our family. But our way isn’t the only way.
Now, let’s jump into the numbers. For a live budget walkthrough in YNAB check out the video below. For all the written details, just scroll on down.
Income Earned in November – $9,328
We live on last month’s income. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, check out the video explaining how living on last month’s income changed our lives or the post explaining how we got to that point.
This income section shows the money we earned in November, which has all been set aside to use in our November budget. The spending section below shows the money we earned in October and spent in November.
Attorney Income – $6,823 Mike works as an attorney for the state of California. This is his take-home pay after taxes, social security, and health insurance premiums. He recently got a pay increase, but still has the pandemic-related 10% pay cut like all California state employees.
Blogging Income – $1,505 This is my blogging income after expenses have been taken out. My blog has really taken a backseat to life right now, but I’m thankful that it still brings in something even if it is neglected.
Rental Income – $1,000 We rent the one-bedroom apartment on our property. We’ve had it listed on Airbnb for the last few years, but we have a long-term renter now instead. Though we make much less in rent than we did with Airbnb, there are some big perks. We don’t have to clean and turn over the apartment between stays and with covid it’s nice to have something steady. We expect that we’ll go back to Airbnb after our current renter moves out. If you’re thinking about renting out your space, check out Mike’s post about dealing with insurance for your Airbnb rental or our explanation of how we handle our Airbnb finances.
Spending in November
Each month we budget the previous month’s income down to zero. This is how we spent the money we earned in October.
Giving
Tithing – $998 We always pay a 10% tithe on our income. This tithing (like all of our November spending) comes from the money we earned in October. You can read our thoughts on paying a 10% tithe here.
Fast Offering – $100 Each month we take one day to fast (go without food and drink) for two meals and contribute to a charity program that helps provide for the local poor.
Monthly Bills
Mortgage – $2,837 We re-financed our 15-year mortgage to a rate of 2.875% back in December 2019, which was an amazing rate then. Rates have gone down even more since then; as low as 2.3% APR today! If you have dependable income and a mortgage, there’s serious savings waiting for you on one of life’s biggest expenses. Mike shares our experience with a true no-cost mortgage re-fi, with all the numbers you could want. Anyone with a current mortgage rate above three percent is likely to find a better rate now. Check out the post to see how you might be able to save.
Electricity – $173 Our electric bill covers both our home and our rental. Our house and rental are both completely electric, with no gas or propane. It’s nice to have this bill going down now that it’s fall.
Car Insurance – $78 We took Mike’s vehicle off the insurance at the beginning of the pandemic when we realized he would be working from home indefinitely. We’re essentially a one-car family now and saving on insurance and registration. We have insurance with USAA and love them! If you, your parent, or your spouse were/are in the military, you’re probably eligible for USAA too!
Internet – $70 Having good internet access at home is super important now with everyone at home for work and school. We’re so glad we invested in bringing internet access to our property when we first bought our house (a $5,000 investment)!
Water – $78 This bill comes every other month. Last month we set aside $150 and the bill was $228, so we just needed an additional $78.
Cell Phones – $50 After years with Republic Wireless, we both switched our cell phones to Visible. We still think Republic Wireless is a great option for people with good reception from Sprint or T-Mobile, but at our house, Verizon is the only carrier with a reliable cell signal. Visible is a Verizon subsidiary that offers wifi calling and unlimited cell calls and data on the Verizon 4G LTE network, all for $25 a month! Having cell signal to complement our wifi access is especially important for us since our power company here in California periodically shuts off power because of wildfire danger. No power means no wifi and without cell reception, that meant that with Republic Wireless we had no phone service during power outages. We’re happy paying a few dollars more each month to Visible for more reliable communication.
Another great choice for affordable cell phones is Mint Mobile, especially if you want to bring your own phone. I’ve had readers rave about their great service and you can get data for even less than Republic Wireless.
If you are paying more than you want for cell service, check out one of these three great and affordable companies: Visible, Republic Wireless, Mint Mobile.
Orthodontist – $61 Since our oldest gets her braces adjusted every other month, we’re treating this as a monthly bill rather than paying it all up front. These payments will last for another year.
Disability Insurance- $151 This will replace about 2/3 of Mike’s current income for the rest of his life if injury or illness leaves him unable to work. Our income potential is our greatest financial asset right now and this insurance helps us protect it.
Piano – $120 Our oldest started piano lessons with me but has now graduated to a teacher who isn’t mom. The next three kids are still taking lessons from me.
Everyday Expenses
Food – $463 We didn’t have a normal monthly grocery haul this month since we were gone for more than half of the month, but we still bought food.
Fuel – $484 This looks like a pre-covid gas budget because we took a road trip in November.
Household Misc – $169 We got some regular household things, including some things for our road trip.
Clothing – $58 – I ordered some clothes from The Children’s Place and got shoes for our younger daughter.
Animals – $25 We got a bag of cat food.
Kids’ Activities/School – $0
Allowances – $70 Because our allowance system is age-based, we increase this monthly amount as kids have birthdays. We give our kids “practice money” as a weekly allowance. You can read all about why we decided to pay our kids allowance that’s not directly tied to chores, as well as all the details of when and how much in this blog post.
Sinking Funds
For most of our budget categories, we zero out what is left at the end of the month and send it to our mortgage payoff goal, but in our sinking funds we set aside money each month for periodic expenses and let it build up until we need it.
The amount in bold is the amount we added to the fund this month. Any spending is noted in the comments along with the current balance of each fund.
We do not have separate bank accounts for these funds. All of the money sits in our checking account. We’re not worried about getting the money mixed up because we spend according to our budget category balances, not our checking account balance. We seriously never even look at our checking account balance unless we’re reconciling the account. We track our budget categories and spending in YNAB.
Medical/Dental – $400 added. We spent $2,910 on medical bills, which pretty much wiped out this category. We hit our deductible. Current category balance is $38.
Car Maintenance – $0 added. We decided to stop putting money toward this category for now. We have a nice balance and we’re only driving one car, and rarely, so we don’t have a lot of maintenance to do. Current category balance is $3,973.
Christmas – $100 added. We spent $34 on some early Christmas spending! Current category balance is $647.
Life Insurance – $75 added. Normally we add $75 per month here and then we have what we need for our life insurance premiums which will be due next November. Current category balance is $75.
Birthdays & Gifts – $40 added. We spent $0 on gifts in October. Current category balance is $306.
Car Registration & Smog – $0 added. We aren’t adding to this category for now. Current category balance is $461.
Family Fun Fund – $0 added. We didn’t add to or spend from this category in September. Current category balance is $745.
Car Fund – $0 added. We were saving to buy a more efficient commuter car for Mike, but since it looks like he will be working from home for a while still, we’re pausing the $550 monthly contributions we were making to this fund. In fact, we took $1,220 from this category and moved it to the home projects category. Current category balance is $5,059.
Preparedness – $100 added. I stocked up on some emergency chocolate (clearance Halloween candy). Current category balance is $64.
Home Projects- $300 added. We didn’t spend anything on our garden project, but we put aside some money because we will be buying fruit trees soon. The category balance is currently $300.
Investing
Kids’ 529s – $125 We know that $25 per kid per month invested for college isn’t much, but we’re not super concerned about college costs. Scholarships, grants, loans, and jobs during school worked for us. We may accelerate this savings later, but it’s not our highest priority now. You can read about our decision to start saving a little for college in this post.
IRA (Steph) – $500 With $500 monthly, I’ll max out my $6,000 IRA contribution for 2020. Mike has a little over $700 each month deducted directly from his paycheck into a pension fund.
Mortgage Payoff Goal Progress
Our big financial goal right now is paying off our mortgage. At the end of 2018 we made a goal to pay it off in 5 years. It looks kind of impossible on paper right now. We’ve made some adjustments to our priorities (hello garden!), so if we don’t make it exactly in our five-year time frame, we’ll be ok with that too. You can read about our mortgage-payoff goal here and see the numbers for our most recent re-fi here.
We paid $1,533 of principal in our normal November mortgage payment, but we didn’t put any EXTRA toward the principal this month. We did set aside $1,755 to put toward the principal, but we’re actually going to save it for closing costs on a new mortgage refi that’s happening soon. We’ll explain more about it soon.
That brings our totals to:
Current balance (after November 2020 payment): $273,131
For reference:
Original balance of 15-year mortgage: $372,700
Balance at start of 5-year goal (Nov 2018): $363,171
Percent of 5-year goal reached: 24.8%
Percent of 5-year time elapsed (25 mo): 41.7%. Yep, we’re behind!
You can get this hand-drawn brick house printable progress chart here. I love that it has LOTS of spaces (365 in total) so that we can color it in often and celebrate our progress! It would work great for paying off your mortgage OR saving for a down payment.
Whew! That was a lot of numbers. Thanks for reading our personal finances made public!
How About You?
- How did your budget and/or debt repayment go in November?
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Our school year is wrapping up, and we are heading into a relatively normal Christmas and summer, having effectively eliminated Covid – Victoria, which was the only state to suffer through a second wave, has now gone 42 days, three entire virus cycles, without a locally acquired case. We call them “donut days” (because a donut looks like a 0) although it’s just as well we don’t celebrate every donut day with donuts, or we would now have an obesity epidemic on our hands! The only way Covid can come into the country is via returning citizens/residents, who must stay in hotel quarantine for 2 weeks; so as long as our quarantine systems hold up, we should be okay. But it’s very hard for me to not go overseas – we had a trip to Tonga planned for June, which was canceled, and I was hoping to snag some cheap tickets to Buenos Aires or Rio this year too. Alas, international travel is off the books until probably 2022. My first trip will be visiting my parents in the US.
But, the impossibility of travel, coupled with months of lockdown, mean we’ve been able to save record amounts of money this year – at least twice as much as we normally save, even after acquiring our second rental property earlier this year and paying someone else to do the necessary repairs. (It’s in Queensland; we’re in Victoria; the state borders were closed for about eight months.)
I am so grateful for the lessons of this year. We have learned how to be resilient; how to adapt; how to persevere, though all seems bleak. My children have learned to how to work and study independently. Most of all, as Victorians, we have learned to pull together and work as a community. We all sacrificed something important so that we can now enjoy this level of freedom – birthdays, Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Passover, Eid, family gatherings, meeting with friends, live music, theatre, festivals, eating out, going to the movies, going to church and school: each and every one of us gave up something that was important to us to protect the people we love – and to protect complete strangers. As lockdown lifted I could not help but feel a deep sense of gratitude and love towards each stranger I met, knowing they sacrificed for me, and knowing that their very presence there was proof that my sacrifices for them were worth it. On our very first donut day I told my children, “Remember this. When you are faced with challenging times – and you will be – remember this day. You can overcome. You can do hard things.”
Here’s hoping for a joyous Hannukah, Christmas, Kwanza, Solstice, or, if you don’t celebrate any special holidays this time of year, just a joyous and happy time. Here’s hoping 2021 brings with it a greater amount of normality. Here’s hoping we remember the valuable lessons of 2020, and incorporate them in our lives moving forward, even as we are able to put the stress and tension and anxiety of this year behind us. To those of you who have lost something or someone important – my deepest condolences. Here’s to brighter days ahead, for all of us!
Wow, this is amazing that your entire country has come together like this! I am jealous and wish so badly my country would all work towards one common goal instead of fight over every little thing.
We are incredibly fortunate. But it comes at a cost. Even as an American citizen I’m not able to leave the country. It was hard work eliminating the virus; and it was worth it; and this relative normality is our reward. But I just want to hug my mom, and I won’t be able to do that for a very, very long time.
I am interested to hear the details on your new refi. It is something we have considered but haven’t done.
We always base our budget on the current months income but I think it might be time to switch to living on last months income. I started selling on Etsy and we have a few other income streams that are making it harder to budget our old way. Thanks for always sharing your numbers. It is so interesting to see how other frugal families budget.
We live in Rhode Island. Cancelling auto insurance here means that you will have to turn in your auto registration as insurance is mandatory and the state receives reports of cancellations and calls for the return of your plates. They we’d need to apply for (and pay for ) a new registration when we wanted to use the car again. We cancelled insurance on one of our vehicles when it was not practical to repair our van and hadn’t found a replacement vehicle to transfer the registration to by the time they called in the plate. We could showed the proof that we’d sold the car for scrap and were no longer the owners of the vehicle, but to keep the registration we would have had to reinstate and pay insurance on a vehicle we didn’t own and wouldn’t be able to collect on. Depending on where you live and what the laws are suspending or cancelling auto insurance may not be your best option.
That sounds complicated! I agree that wouldn’t be very nice to deal with just to save some money. I guess it’s easier in California since that don’t do anything with your plates. For us it’s more like a suspended registration. It shouldn’t be a problem to reregister it when we decide to insure and drive it again. Definitely check out the laws where you live before suspending or cancelling your insurance and registration.
I also discovered firsthand just how time-intensive homeschooling is, and I was only homeschooling my oldest! Of course, my biggest issue with homeschooling was that I have two younger children (a toddler and a baby), and it became EXTREMELY hard to get focused time in every day. Since we ended up recently moving to a much more rural area, we decided to enroll our daughter in kindergarten instead of homeschooling any longer, and I won’t lie–it’s been a big relief.
I hope your homeschooling experience continues to go smoothly, and of course I’ll be expecting (eventually) a post all about how you’re doing it on a budget!
That’s great that kindergarten is going well for you! It is definitely hard to have two little ones on top of the homeschooling ones. One of the big advantages I have right now is that I have older kids to help, especially my 11 and 12 year old. I think you are at one of the hardest stages of parenting (at least it was for me): having three kiddos who basically need you for everything is hard!! By the time I had my 4th, my oldest was able to be really helpful, and from there each baby was easier, but three was hard.
As for the homeschooling budget, we’re really spoiled to be homeschooling through a charter in California. I get a $2,700 per student to be used on curriculum, books, art supplies, extra curricular classes and sports (when it’s not a pandemic), and other “educational” things. So, it’s hardly a tight budget! But before we got into the charter (there was a waiting list) I started in a more “budget-friendly” kind of way. You’re right, I should do a post about it!
Welcome to the homeschooling world! it’s our third year, but this year has been especially hard! No field trips, no zoos, no museums, no co-op friends, it’s been so sad!
We are still paying on our federal student loans, but to a money market instead of paying them off. We decided to just hold the money in a money market (we could have gotten a better holding place, but we didn’t know how long the deferral would be) until Dec. 31. Well, it’s been extended ANOTHER month, so we’ll pay enough to max out the student loan interest tax benefit ($2500) and then pay the rest of the chunk at the end of January (or whenever, in case it’s extended AGAIN.) We’ve made about $60 in interest by just letting it sit there, and you better believe that’s going towards the student loan! We made a goal initially to pay $35,000 ish. That would pay off all the interest and the balance of the former-highest-interest-rate loan (of course, now they are all 0%). Well, we were able to reach that and go beyond! Right now we have $45,000 and since it’s been extended, we’ll have at least another $6000 to add to that. Very exciting. Our balance will be about $132,000. Our goal to pay it all of is by March of 2023.
That’s so awesome Lisa! You are doing great on those goals! That’s fantastic that you’ve been able to take advantage of the deferral time by putting your payments somewhere you can get some interest! Every little bit helps! Way to smash those goals! Keep it up!!
I considered removing the insurance from our second vehicle as well during the pandemic when we aren’t commuting or driving much. However, I read that it’s bad to not move a car for long–the tires can permanently flatten, it’s bad for the engine oil, etc. What are your thoughts on making that decision? We will be working from home until June so there would still be time to save on car insurance.
Hi Heather! I think that is true. We drive ours occasionally on our property or change its parking spot, but that’s probably not enough to prevent any mechanical problems, though it might help with the tires. I’m not a car expert, so I can’t help you there! We were saving to get Mike a Prius to commute in and then we were going to sell the van we have parked, but when Mike stopped commuting we paused that goal (he might be working from home for the long haul). Mike actually wanted to sell it instead of just taking it off the insurance and unregistering it, but with wildfires in California and us living a little remote, I didn’t want anyone to be without a car if one of us were gone and the other were at home. I guess another factor for us is that our van (a 2005, I think) is only worth around $2,000 or so.