Tasha shares everything that she and her family spent money on for the month of January in this financial diary! Want to make money changes? Check out this video on resolutions anyone can keep:
Hi i’m tasha from one big happy life on behalf of the financial diet and this is the lifestyle fix brought to you by skill share in today’s video i’m gonna be taking you behind the scenes of my own personal finances and sharing exactly how i spent my money over the past month my partner joseph and i have set some pretty ambitious goals for ourselves this year
Including paying off thirty thousand dollars worth of debt and saving twenty four thousand dollars for college for our daughter who’s currently in community college but will be switching over to a four-year university in just one more year joseph and i are both attorneys i practice and he doesn’t when it comes to our finances we use a budgeting method that we call
The one year budget where we budget for the whole year at once we did a whole video on it over at one big happy life if you want to check that out i’ll drop a link to it down in the description box below the basic idea behind the one year budget is that it makes it easier to hit your financial goals because you can actually see your cash flow for the entire year
For the first three months of the year we’re focusing heavily on debt payoff so to kick that off we decided to do a no spend month in january i really like doing no spins in january because it’s kind of a nice break after the spending flurry of december and we typically don’t have any birthdays or trips that we need to worry about spending for which makes it the
Perfect time to go on a spending fast okay so let’s take a look at how our january went first let’s talk about our income so joseph and i both make a six-figure income we also always max out our pre-tax retirement accounts and hsas we pay for health dental vision life and disability insurance all with pre-tax money except for one exception which i’m going to talk
About later we also have our business one big happy life that brings an income every single month that income can vary quite a bit from month to month and of course we have to pay for things like business expenses and taxes before we can actually pay ourselves when we budget we only include our take-home pay we track our retirement savings in our net worth updates
Which we’ve been sharing every month for the past two years on one big happy life for january our total take-home pay from all income sources was sixteen thousand dollars eleven thousand dollars is from our day job and five thousand is from one big happy life so now let’s talk expenses when we budget we divide our expenses into four categories transportation
Housing lifestyle and debt so let’s start with transportation we live in the suburbs outside of washington dc and we commute one and a half hours each way into the office two to three times a week we currently own two cars and are planning to buy a third car later this year because our daughter alexis commutes back and forth to her college campus we use public
Transportation for most of our commute but we do have to drive to get to the train our employers pay for our transit passes so our transportation costs only include gas insurance and repairs we have a 2015 honda fit that has a car note which i’ll talk about down in the debt section we also have a 2012 dodge journey that is paid off in january we paid $200 in car
Insurance and $80 on gas we filled up our cars each once this month we also set aside a hundred dollars a month for maintenance expenses so we can cover things like oil changes when the time comes our insurance actually doubled this month because alexis our 16 year old got her driver’s license our car insurance payment also includes the premium for our umbrella
Insurance policy which is basically a type of extra personal liability insurance that would kick in if our other insurance wasn’t enough to cover any damages if we’re at fault so we spent a total of two hundred and eighty dollars on transportation costs this month now let’s go over our housing expenses we live in an expensive area of the country so even though we
Do have a serious commute our house is still pretty pricey we have a 2800 square foot four bedroom two and a half bathroom house with a two-car garage and a wooded backyard our mortgage is $3,200 a month which includes our property taxes and homeowners insurance we paid $300 for electricity and gas $100 for internet $90 for our unlimited cell phone plans for three
Phones for a total of $3,700 in recurring monthly housing expenses for our family of four this month we also prepaid for an entire year of monitoring for our alarm system and that was $100 we also paid our quarterly water bill which was a hundred and forty dollars so our total housing expenses for this month was around four thousand dollars now let’s talk about
The lifestyle stuff the lifestyle section has things that really are about our daily quality of life a lot of it is stuff that we could cut back on or cut out altogether if we needed to we pay a thousand dollars a month for preschool for our two-year-old that includes an extra hundred dollars a month that we pay for extended care because he likes to be able to go
Outside and play with the kids after school and he gets upset whenever he’s leaving and they’re still outside playing so we pay more so that he can be out there having fun and we can have a little bit of extra time too on top of that this month we had to pay an extra two hundred dollars to register him for it the summer 2019 semester and the 2019 2020 school year
We paid five hundred dollars for our daughter’s spring semester college tuition she’s 16 and she’s a full-time community college student this is her third semester and she’s planning on transferring to university in the fall of 2020 we also paid an extra four hundred and fifty dollars in health insurance premiums we both have health insurance through our employers
But neither policy covers infertility treatments we’re planning on doing ivf this year so we purchased private insurance to cover that that means i’m actually covered by two full health insurance plans we spent seven hundred and seventy two dollars on groceries which includes things like all of our household items diapers toilet paper dog food and trash bags it
Also includes fifty dollars that we spent eating out for one night aside from eating out that one time we cooked all of our meals at home including brewing coffee at home and taking it with us to work every day so that’s breakfast lunch dinner and snacks for a family of four our budget includes up to a thousand dollars in groceries and eating out so we came in
Well under budget this month we pay $50 a month for subscriptions which includes netflix starz amazon prime and audible right now we have stars because we’re watching season four of outlander once that’s over we’ll stop our subscription until the winter when outlander comes back of course we’ll be picking up hbo in april for the last season of game of thrones so
The expense won’t be going away entirely between my day job my business and my family and friends i don’t have a lot of time to sit down and read books so i listen to audiobooks whenever i can i do borrow free audiobooks from my live when they were available but they aren’t always available so i like to have the audible of subscription we also set aside money in
Savings account for gifts and clothing two hundred dollars each we didn’t buy any clothing this month so that money will just be there when we’re ready to go shopping for something we did spend ninety dollars on gifts so only a hundred and ten dollars will go into our gift savings account joseph and i each get a hundred dollars a month to spend on whatever we feel
Like i have no idea what he spent his money on but i bought myself a new planner that was $50 plus shipping it’s the 2019 power sheets goal planner we’re making some major shifts in our business this year so i wanted to have something to help me work through those goals and the progress that i want to make over the next year our total lifestyle spending for january
It was $2,800 okay so now let’s talk about our debt payments like i said this year were focused on paying off all of our consumer debt except for our mortgage and student loans outside of our mortgage payment we paid $1,600 in minimum payments on our consumer debts every month including our student loans on top of that this month we put an extra six thousand four
Hundred dollars towards debt this month and so we were able to pay off our car note so in total we paid nine thousand dollars towards debt this month including the thousand dollars in mortgage principal that we pay every month as part of our mortgage payment because january was a no spend month for me i thought i’d talk a little bit about the things that i wanted
To buy this month but didn’t first a new pair of spanx and a new bra earlier this month i had a photo shoot for o magazine i’m gonna be in a spread in the april issue they handled all of the wardrobing but i was responsible for my undergarments i really wanted to go out and buy new things just for the photo shoot but i resisted the urge and i’m glad i did because
Everything turned out just fine on my way home from new york city after the shoot i wanted to go to starbucks for a snack but didn’t i also wanted to buy a new face cream and get a new tub of brow gel but instead i’m going to use up every last drop of the products that i currently have even though the face cream i’m using doesn’t appear to be doing much and my
Eyebrow gel is pretty dried up so i’ve just been adding water lastly i really wanted to buy a car this month joseph and the lexus had our cars and i needed to go get reis from unexpectedly and i couldn’t because i didn’t have a car it was really frustrating and it made me want to finance a car right now instead of waiting nine months for us to be able to save up
The cash joseph talked me off the ledge but unlike the other times that i didn’t spend money this month i’m actually still pretty unhappy about having to play musical cars for most of 2019 frankly i’m willing to pay more in interest so that i can have the flexibility of not having to plan around my other family members schedules so i think this is something that
Joseph and i will actually revisit in april once we’ve knocked out the rest of our debt now that i’ve shared the result of my no spend month and where my money goes in a typical month let’s talk about a great place to go shopping for some new life skills skillshare skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes in design business technology and
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Transcribed from video
My $16,000 January Spending Diary | The Lifestyle Fix By The Financial Diet
