October 2019 Budget

Our student loan debt tracker that lives on our fridge

The biggest piece of budget related news this month is that we paid off another one of Mike’s loans!!! 🎉🎉🎉 Which means I got to color in a bunch of boxes on our debt tracker (pictured above)… doesn’t really look that much different from the last time I posted a picture of our tracker back in March 2019. I got some money in September and October for re-working the online versions of two courses that I teach (still working on one of them!), which we put straight towards the current loan we were focusing on. We padded it with just under $1,000 from our emergency savings account (which is now at about $1,000) and were able to pay it off. That means that Mike only has one more high interest loan (at just under 7% interest) to pay off. He does have a loan from undergrad that’s at about 2.5% interest that we’re letting sit because the monthly payments cover the interest. The next loan we’re targeting has about $6,000 left. We should be able to get that paid off by the end of 2020. Then, it’s time to decide what to do about my PSLF loans. I have three definite years of service in the program, plus three potential years that I need to get figured out (I believe I’d have to file an appeal through the Temporary Expanded PSLF program if it’s still around). I could potentially file for PSLF in 4-ish years, assuming the appeal process through the expanded program is still around. If it’s not, then that means 7 more years. Either way, I kind of just want to be done with them (at least the high interest one’s) and am not interested in gambling on qualifying for the expanded program in four years. As we get closer to paying off Mike’s last high interest loan, we’ll think more about what makes most sense financially and what’s possible.

In other “exciting” budget news, we bought a DVD player, ha! Ellie wanted to rent a DVD from the library but we didn’t have a way to watch it. Our library lets you rent DVD players (and other things like tools and instruments and games!), but it’s only for a week and we were afraid we’d break the rental and have to pay for one anyway… because when you have a three year old something in the house gets broken on a daily basis. We rented one for a week from the library and after returning it we just decided to go get one for ~25 bucks. So now we have officially joined the 21st century and purchased a DVD player (which are probably becoming obsolete anyway… but Ellie has been enjoying the videos she’s checked out from the library and that’s all that matters).

And finally, the budget %s below account for changes in our student loan payments, plus a few other things I moved around or took out.

Previous budget posts can be found here: December 2018 (first post with background information), January 2019, February 2019, March 2019, April 2019, May 2019, June 2019, July 2019, August 2019, and September 2019.

October 2019 budget

Housing
Budgeted: 43.41%
Spent: 42.90%
Leftover: 0.51% ⇒ Emergency Fund

What’s included? Mortgage payment, property taxes, home insurance, home warranty, and any home improvement costs.

Groceries
Budgeted: 19.54%
Spent: 17.52%
Leftover: 2.02% ⇒ Emergency Fund

What’s included? Food, non-food cooking stuff, toiletries, cat supplies, cleaning supplies, paper products, pharmacy… anything you can buy at the grocery store.  

Utilities
Budgeted: 7.46%
Spent: 5.51%
Leftover: 1.95% ⇒ Part of this went to cover additional in Misc Category, the rest went to our Emergency Fund

What’s included? Electric, gas, water, and trash.

Travel related expenses
Budgeted: 8.47%
Spent: 6.65%
Savings for yearly bills: 0.29%
Leftover: 1.53% ⇒ Emergency Fund

What’s included? Car insurance, gas, car registration (billed every 2 years), AAA (billed once a year), savings for a car maintenance fund, and a general travel fund for family visits and smaller local trips.

Phone/internet
Budgeted: 3.29%
Spent: 2.77%
leftover: 0.52% ⇒ Emergency Fund

What’s included? Phone bills, phone insurance, internet

Health
Budgeted: 1.09%
Spent: 1.63%
Over budget: 0.54% ⇒ reimbursed

What’s included? Doctor’s bills (we also have an FSA but keep this additional fund to give us a little more padding just in case).

October notes: Another month, more doctors visits.

Miscellaneous
Budgeted: 3.16%
Spent: 3.96%
savings for yearly bills: 0.22%
Over budget: 1.02% ⇒ Moved $ from preschool fund from savings and also pulled some from utilities

What’s included? A random assortment of things… jewelry insurance (billed once a year), a once a year haircut for me, Netflix, Prime membership (billed once a year), website hosting (billed once a year), and just a general miscellaneous category. For the things that are billed once a year, I just divide them by 12 and include it as a line on our budget each month, putting it into savings each month, letting it earn a tiny bit of interest. In early spring 2019 I added Ellie’s co-op preschool and 2 membership subscription sites that are blog related.

October notes: This is category is always going to be over because of how I set up Ellie’s preschool funds. I set aside ~300 in savings during the summer to reduce the bill each month during the school year. We budget 86 for the month and then pull the remaining amount from savings (it’s a co-op so it’s cheaper than a typical preschool at 115/mo). So we were over budget but it was planned. And… we also bought a DVD player (as I mentioned above) because Ellie’s been wanting to rent DVDs from the library, but we don’t have a way to watch them. We don’t have an electronics category so I just pulled the money from our general misc category (which is only about 20 bucks, so we went over budget there too).

Dining out/entertainment
Budgeted: 1.09%
Spent: 0.96%
Leftover: 0.13% ⇒ Emergency Fund

What’s included? Dining out/take out, museums, kid stuff (e.g., a class at the rec center for Ellie).

Gifts
Budgeted: 0.54%
spent: 0.02%
Leftover: 0.52% ⇒ gift savings fund

What’s included? Gifts, mainly for Ellie, sometimes for the occasional wedding or new baby. Mike and I don’t buy each other gifts (aside from the occasional food item during holidays/birthdays). We’ve got a gift moratorium going on for family/friends birthdays. Anything left over in this category gets put into our savings until we need it.  

Clothing
Budgeted: 0.54%
Spent: 0%
Leftover: 0.54% ⇒ Clothing savings fund

What’s included? Clothes (pretty self explanatory)

Retirement
Budgeted: 1.30%
moved to savings: 1.30%

What’s included: Monthly contributions to a Roth IRA

Student loans
Budgeted: 9.95%
Spent: 9.95%
leftovers from above categories: Putting everything Towards Emergency Fund

What’s included: Mike’s student loan payments and my student loan payments. The % budgeted/spent reflects our bottom line payment (e.g., our minimum payment amounts, plus a little extra on Mike’s so interest doesn’t accrue).

October notes: As I mentioned above, we paid off another one of Mike’s loans!!! 🎉🎉🎉 Which means he’s only got two loans to go! The one we’re focused on right now has about $6000 left and ~7% interest. We should be able to pay it off by the end of 2020. His final loan has an interest rate of ~2.5%, so we’re leaving that be. And then it’ll be time to make a decision about what to do with my PSLF loans. Because we put a bunch of money towards loans this month (which I count separately from the percentages above), we’re focused on getting the emergency fund back up a bit (since we pulled from it to pay off the loan).

October 2019 Student Loan Progress