Articles with budget

February 2017 Spending: Our Money Went Where?!

February was a great month for us! Or maybe it wasn’t who knows? Oh wait, I should know… Maybe I should write “February was A month for us!” and just leave out a descriptor, good or bad. There wasn’t a lot of change although I noticed our “pets” category comprised 10% of our total spend for the month. Yipe! I got a bonus at work – woohoo! That was pretty unexpected considering we still didn’t make money last year, but I am not complaining. Beyond that, it was a pretty normal month. For the number voyeurs out there, here is a look at the charts and graphs of our spending and how it stacks up to last month.

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Visualizing Early Retirement – It only took me 6 years…

I was reading some past blog posts and I came across this one and it reminded me how lucky I am to have met Mrs. SSC. I’m also often reminded by Mrs. BITA, how lucky I am that she is so patient with me, especially because it took me 6 years to realize that achieving financial independence and early retirement (FIRE) before we turned 45 was really possible. Yes, 6 years… The following post elaborates on that backstory and the struggles Mrs. SSC has had to put up with before I finally “got it.” Thanks for sticking with me Mrs. SSC, even though I know it gets difficult at times.

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January 2017 Spending: Our Money Went Where?

January, thank goodness you’re over… It seems like once one thing gets taken care of another comes up. So how did January pan out for us – expensive. Lots of deltas, not too many plusses. Some of it was fun, some of it was sad, and some of it was routine things that snowball into more expensive costs than we expected. Here’s the rundown of our spending this month and where we are in relation to our FIRE/FFLC goal.

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I STILL Have a Spending Problem

I recently got an email from Chase notifying me that my year end rollup is ready for review. They are nice enough to do this for you if you have a Chase card, yeah, they split out your yearly spending into categories like groceries, auto, shopping, medical, and the ever present miscellaneous. They even show you how those categories break out from month to month! Awesome!  I switched from Chase to an Amazon card (still held by Chase so I still get this awesome benefit) mid-year last year so I only had 6 months of spending tracked, but lo and behold, they also still had my 2015 yearly roundup available to review as well. This is only my allowance card, so it was pretty eye opening seeing where I spent my money. Spoiler alert, I’m not rolling out all the charts and graphs, play sad trombone sound – bwah, bwah, bwah, bwaaaahhhh…. Okay, I’ll add some charts because they are pretty useful in analyzing spending. They did highlight to me, the fact that I still have a spending problem.

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2016 Spending: Where did it all go?

I’ve finally gotten motivated to pull our 2016 numbers together and put them out there for your voyeuristic perusal. That’s not true, Mrs. SSC did that about a month ago, but I’ve been feeling a bit unmotivated, so there’s been a delay. For those of you that don’t care to see charts or hit the nitty gritty, the summary is that 2016 was no 2015 in terms of savings. The overall outside 401k investing sums were down, however, I am happy in the fact that it wasn’t from lack of saving, rather we essentially piled it into cash in the event we suffered double layoffs. That didn’t happen, thank goodness, and instead Mrs. SSC took a teaching job with a huge paycut and we’re all happier as a result. That’s pretty much 2016 in a nutshell. Below I’ve put together more details on where our money went and a chart on how it compares to 2015, and what we plan to change for 2017.

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November 2016: Our Money Went Where?

November, the month of high spending, at least around this household. I realized mid-month that last year we also had a big overage in November due to an errant $1200 grocery bill that month $350 of it was a wine/liquor restock that got moved to “shopping/misc” lol). This month looks like a similar high spending month, though not due to groceries. My thoughts for this recurring phenomenon are two-fold. First, I think we do a pretty good job of staying on track most of the year, so we’re bound to have some “off” months. Secondly, I think November is the month that we let down our guard because we’ve been doing so well relatively speaking from the rest of the year.

Like me and Calculus – as long as I diligently did the 2-3 hrs of home work every week, I could get A’s on the tests. As soon as I stopped doing homework because I thought, “I’ve got this, I don’t need to do the homework”, I get D’s on the tests. I only got A’s because I was mindful and worked hard at it, and staying on track with our spending requires a similar effort. I think this is why so many people find tracking spending or trying to stick to budgets so discouraging. You can’t be perfect all the time. Except, I’m okay with that, just not every month, lol.  Without further ado, here’s how our November spending broke down.

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October 2016: Our Money Went Where?

October, us such a great month. You have Halloween, the leaves change, and you start to get cooler temperatures outside as well. Now that the month is over, a lookback on our spending. Overall, it was up about $1200 compared to September due to some big ticket one off purchases, and our 6 month car insurance renewal coming due. What else happened in the SSC household this month? Let’s take a look!

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Time Changes Everything: 2 years blogging!

I can’t believe it’s been 2 years since we started the blog! Okay, it’s actually 2 months late, but, close enough for me. Going back thru all of our earlier posts and reading them (yeah I read almost all of them – again) I realized, “Holy Cow some things have changed a LOT since we started writing. Here’s what I found has changed in our Financially Independent Retire Early (FIRE) mindset, our myriad of plans, my comfort level with leaving the workforce at my peak earning years (who does that?!) and even how our timing has changed over the years. Before we get to the changes, I just want to say THANK-YOU to everyone that’s followed the blog, makes comments on the posts, and retweets the scant few things I put out there! You guys are an awesome community and I’m glad to be a part of it!

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Our Money Went Where? September 2016 Update

What a month September was for us! It was our lowest monthly spend so far this year – with daycare reduction being a YUGE part of that (couldn’t resist…). Beyond some minor one-offs everything still seems to be on track with usual or even below last year’s benchmarks and the plan is still a go for Summer 2018 for at least me to quit anyway. I’ll discuss how that plan is evolving and more details of our last months’ spending. Enough of that jibber jabber, let’s get into the details!

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