Earnings and Spending – January 2010
My friend, this took me longer than I’d care to admit to organize and figure out (ahem more than four hours). I have been tracking our money all month long, so I knew where we stood. However, just because I was tracking the money doesn’t mean it was organized. Tonight, I spent forever, FOR-EV-ER, sorting out all of the expenses into categories (gas, groceries, living expenses, etc.). I’m telling you, I was a teenager when I started categorizing all of our expenses, and now I’m 42.
While it took forever, FOR-EV-ER, to do this, it was a vital step in taking control of our spending. Now that we know how much we spend on entertainment, food and things like this, we can work to cut back and then put more money towards paying down debt. I did a gosh darn good job on the grocery bill this month, if I do say so myself.
Drum roll please….
Together Steve and I made $4,788.25. This is the money that we put in the bank and earned in cash. This is after health insurance, dental, vision, retirement, some taxes and some life insurance came out of our checks.
Our expenses for the month totaled $4,340.25.
Which at first though, made me think, “Wow we have an extra $448.00 on hand.” Then I remembered, that we haven’t turned in our tithing for the month which is almost exactly $448.00.
Here is the breakdown of our expenses for the month…
A few things to point out about the expenses…
CC stands for credit card. R-SL1 stands for Renee Student Loan 1.
Living expenses include rent, utilities, cell phone and renters insurance.
We got hit with a few late charges. We paid $22.67 in late fees on the car taxes, and $39.00 in late fees on CC Green. The frustrating thing is that these late fees were not incurred because we didn’t have the money on hand, but because we were not organized in our paper work. This is $61.67 wasted! WASTED! GONE! BUH-BYE! That money could have gone to a few dozen different things.
Through diligent couponing and grocery add scanning I saved $73.11 on my groceries and drugstore purchases (household and hygiene products). We did really well on our food expenses this month, but I’ve also depleted our food storage. Next month, I anticipate this expense going up to restock the pantry.
Owning two cars is really expensive! The car payment, the maintenance, the gas, the insurance, the taxes. We spent more money on transportation this month than we did on living expenses. There is something seriously wrong with this picture.
Minus $20.00 for my annual OBGYN visit, all of the other medical expenses we paid this month were left over from last year. My medical bills were huge last year, and the $300+ that we paid this year, is just a small junk of what we owe. OUCH.
We lost Steve’s birth certificate more than a year ago, so we had to spend $20.00 to replace it. Another expense that was incurred because of our lack of organization. I bet we find the last one eventually, which will also drive me insane.
Despite the expenses that were incurred because of our stupidity, I think we did good this month. I’m proud of the financial learning that took place. We know where our money is going, and how we can work to cut costs. We paid more than our minimum payments on our credit cards, and my student loan. We also spent an entire month experimenting with ways to track and organizing our earnings and spending.
At this rate, we should be millionaires by the end of the year. Har-har… Ok, so we won’t be close to millionaires but we’ll be worth a lot more than we are now.
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Very good. Looks like you guys are definitely in good shape. =)
I swear, if my DH and I did this, we’d be so mad at the amount of money we *could* be saving. I mean I’ve done it before so i sorta know but I don’t wanna see it on paper just yet. Maybe this summer. But good job. Hopefully you figure something out.
Where do you get all your coupons?