Welcome back everyone!
Today we’re going to be looking at a different side of the personal finance equation.
This side of personal finance is the budgeting side, which according to a lot of people in the personal finance and F.I.R.E. community would consider this to be one of the absolute must do’s if you’re out to optimize your income and squeeze every dollar possible out of your army of dollar bills.
This was the first proper budget we had done up in probably a year or so, and we decided it would be great to sure this information with our readers.
Sharing this information is also of benefit to us because it helps give us that little kick or accountability to reach these numbers.
For the sake of keeping a little bit of privacy we will be leaving our income out of this budget, but without further adieu let’s get to the numbers.
The first line up is the giving that we plan to do on a monthly basis, we currently give to one charity monthly and our transaction having already gone through at the the start of the month is reflected in the right column, the “spent” column.
Housing is in our case (and most cases) the largest expense that we face monthly, and while living in a high cost of living area has its upsides it definitely hurts looking at the amount of money we have fixed towards keeping a roof over our heads. That being said, we do love our house and it is a reasonable price for the area so we’re content keeping this set up for as long as we live up North.
Transportation costs are about to go up for us, due to a new commuting situation for Mr. FIC but overall this isn’t going to move the needle too far for us we’ll just need to take a couple of months to get used to the numbers and see what this true cost ends up being. For now, we feel fairly confident in these projections but we’ll see how things go.
Here is where we expect to see the most fluctuation with our spending. We haven’t really hammered down on these numbers yet and will likely get more tuned in on these after the next couple months but these are our guesses on what we spend.
Some may get a chuckle over having lines like “Mrs. FIC’s pampering” but it’s important when budgeting to be honest with yourself and include the transactions that some may see as unneeded, in our case Mrs. FIC works hard and enjoys getting things like her nails done from time to time so there’s no issues here with adding things like this to our budget as long as we can agree to a rough cost and keep it under control the same as we would any other spending.
We’ve also got a bad habit of eating out at restaurants a little more than we should, but we’re more concerned with keeping our groceries + restaurants under a certain number as opposed to keeping each under their limits, so in short we really have a $650.00 food budget for the two of us more so than the $550 + $100 you’d see above. We are working on curbing this habit though!
We drive two cars a few years old, and need insurance on these vehicles in case of unforeseen events.. there’s really not much we can do about these numbers at least in the short term, over time we may look to increase deductibles or lower the insurance on the cars as they become worth less but for now they’re set.
On the debt side of things, it still hurts just a little bit inside to see this outflow each and every month and it’s a constant struggle to keep that student loan debt, but we still can’t bring ourselves to pay it off yet with the interest rates on the loan so low.
That’s really all we’ve got for you today, we hope that you’ve enjoyed and check back in with us at the end of the month to see how we made out when we do our recap.
Thanks for stopping by,
FIC.