Budget Club Mega-Recap

OVERVIEW
This is it, the moment we have all been waiting for. A year’s worth of data to go through and analyze. Budget Club Year One is over and in the books (archives here). It’s an exciting time for everyone, right?! The other day AMR taught me some fancy Google Doc moves, like double sorting and stuff like that, and now I’m ready to use the updated and revamped 2014 Budget Club spreadsheet like a pro. That’s all stuff to come though, in a separate post . This mega-post is all about 2013 and how much damn money I spent.

First off, 2013 was financially a banner year. I had normal job money, I had book money, I had various random income drop in here and there. The last time I felt this rich was on unemployment, when I was paying no rent and grabbing that taxpayer cash. Basically I lived like I wanted and while I didn’t have all that much, I was able to not think a lick about money. That’s the dream right? To not have to think about money?

Things change when you live in New York though, plus that paying rent thing. For the first six months or so of 2013, I lived recklessly. Rent, bills, food, shopping, whatever. I felt buoyed with cash cash everywhere. It was the go go months and I literally took a screenshot of my bank account back in March or April because it was the highest number I think it’s ever been. I can’t find the screenshot now but it was something like $15k. Fast forward to later in the year, like a smash cut from Wolf of Wall Street and there was a moment there when my bank account was in the single digits. Ah the highs and lows. If only that “five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred” from Rent referred to dollars and not minutes…

EXPENSES
During 2013, I spent roughly $47,000. (Shockingly, this was just $200 or so off from what one of my co-budgetters expended. We are excited to compare notes because basically we lived the same gold plated life, apparently.) My 2013 budget should have had me spending around $34k, which means I actually went 138% over budget for the year. If you will recall from my six month recap, I was headed in this disappointing direction already. I was actually surprised at that +38% number, I thought I was much further over.

The good news is that I cut my spending by 33% for July through December and went from living the 70k lifestyle to the 55k lifestyle (I’m just multiplying how much I spent by 133% to get to those numbers, which is a rough take home estimate post-taxes). Overall, my 2013 was spent living like I made about $62k. That doesn’t take into account any savings, any hospital bills, any pre-existing debts, etc. Also I have no dependents, no student loans, no car payments, and don’t pay for my dental or health insurance. Let me remind you that the median household income for 2013 is $51k. How do people live? Hell if I know. I felt like I lived pretty basic but damn, 60k+ is squarely middle class right? I may have to revise my life goal of making 50k from here till eternity. Clearly I better up that number so I can continue sipping on champagne when I'm thirsty

My fixed expenses included only rent, phone bills, utilities, and Netflix. All of that basically stayed steady at about $1,250 per month. Also I got a reimbursement for some of those phone bills from work. So basically it’s just rent and streaming movies for stuff I gotta pay down each month. As for my variable budget, I adjusted it as the year went along, from a high of around $1,800 to the year end cut down mark of about $1,300. Average variable budget for 2013 was $1,600.

So that’s what I budgeted. How much did I actualy spend? Well, I averaged out to $2,700 per month for variable expenses. (Where did this extra grand come from? We’ll address that below in the income section.) Last January was a doozy as I spent 250% of my variable budget, which started the year off on the wrong foot obviously. I wish I knew what all that money was spent on but sadly I only started the monthly Ways and Means columns in February. My best guess was money used to break my phone contract and get on Verizon post-mugging, plus courtside Celtics vs Clippers tickets. Maybe I also went on an online shopping spree. How many hoodies can one person get though? Whatever, January 2013 cost me $4,500 in variable expenses and that was by far the high mark of the year. April and June were high spending months, and my best non-spending months were September through November, which coincided with when I realized I was running out of money. For the record, I only hit my budget allocation once, in October, coming under by three dollars.

The rest of my year-to-date expenses, well, it wasn’t pretty. I averaged $3,950 spent per month. My low was about $2,600 and the high was, well, more than double that. I wish I could tell you that my expenditures was a downward trend but it’s not like that. I guess the good news is that I spent $20.5k over the last six months as opposed to $26.8k the first six. Progress!

It helped that I basically I stopped going to shows, musicals, concerts, etc. by about mid-summer, instead settling into lots of movies and um, lots of movies. Also, it must be said that having a girlfriend was a great help. We traded off paying for lots of meals, she paid for many fun activities (Wicked musical for one), lots of leisure time was spent just hanging around, and when in doubt we could just lay around and read/watch things. I don’t know how much more or less it costs to be single but being in a relationship sure can have some financial advantages — a compelling number one reason to marry! By the end of the year I was definitely asking “how much is that?” a lot more, and declined lots of events because I was brokeness.

Play and travel came in neck and neck with about $4k spent in each. Play encompassed too many categories for me to accurately dig into. Anything that remotely had to do with “playing” I slotted in this category. Movies, nights out, museums, video games bought, whatever. Play is the stuff that life’s made of so it’s hard to turn too inquisitive an eye toward the stuff contained within. But travel, goodness! I didn’t budget much travel at all in the beginning of the year but now I see that it’s a necessity. Even though I stayed in New York most of the year, and didn’t live bicoastally or tri-city, I somehow dropped four grand on travel. Somehow that’s all from nine months too, as from January to March I only spent a paltry $160 in the travel category.

Once I started flying around though, it was big dollops of money everywhere. Puerto Rico in April, Vegas and San Diego in June, plus a short jaunt San Francisco for summer camp. September was another trip to SF for a variety of things, including a flight that I didn’t take and couldn’t get reimbursed. To end the year, there was a flight home from New York in December and another trip (one way driving) to the Bay for New Year’s. That’s actually a pretty small travel size for me. Just five trips or so. Aha, I see what I did here, I added the fees for Camp Grounded and houseboating to “travel.” In the future those type of things should go into another category. I guess it could more accurately be filed under “play” or maybe “vacation."

Let’s talk about transportation and all those taxis and subway rides I took. One of the main reasons I wanted to live in New York was to be away from cars and while I accomplished that, there was still some $3,700 spent on shuttling around. That’s about $300 a month and likely equal to a car payment I guess. Well, minus insurance or parking spaces and gas and maintenance and all that jazz. Okay, I don’t feel so bad about dumping all that money into taxis, as ridiculous as it sounds. Used as a car replacement, it’s almost cheap. Almost.

I spent a mysterious $2,150 on “miscellaneous.” I don’t even know what that means. Next year I should aim to have as little miscellaneous as possible. The 2014 budget sheet will help with that. Hint: category tags are coming for the new version. Get geeked. And looking into percentage overage, “gifts” was the winner here with 515% overage. I think that’s because I expected/budgeted out $300 but somehow spent over fifteen hundred dollars. What did I end up giving people? I have no idea! Apparently some people received things from me, sorry it I didn’t get you anything. Next year?

I’m feeling very transparent right now so here’s the basic chart of what my expenses broke down to, the variable ones anyway. As you can see, dining out took up the majority of my money. It almost eclipses the next three categories altogether. Yes, eating out cost me more than play, travel, and taxis combined. Also, a quick look at the chart reveals that I took more taxis than I bought things. That’s pathetic. You can’t wear/read/keep taxis. You can forgo the easy transportation and buy a Macbook at the end of the year. Then again, the taxi is just soooo convenient.

Also, I added up dining out, groceries, and snacks. Here’s what I came up with: over 365 days, it cost me $35 a day to feed myself. That’s outrageous. If I could halve that number I’d be so loaded. It seems like I should have eaten better for $35 a day. Hum. Oh well, I guess expenses are done here. It’s making me sick. Let’s take a look at how I funded all this excess.

INCOME
The first three months of the year, I made around $3K, then it dipped to half that for two months, before stabilizing at $2300 for the rest of the year. How can one live on $2300 in New York you ask? You can’t! Haha. Basically my year-to-date income versus expenses resulted in a deficit of $19k. “Wait so you spent more than twice what you made? What is going on? Please tell me the secret!” The short answer is: book money (and other sources of income). Between last year’s book deal, a bestseller bonus, a few websites I did, and a year end bonus from work, I am basically at zero dollars for the year. Also there was a small tax return stuck somewhere in there.

My “budget” wasn’t really accurate as my income did not equal my expenses. Basically every month I was drawing from my savings. That’s the entire crux of the argument we’d been having all year. My normal income is from my jobby job, and then there’s income on top of it that I don’t really record as it just goes into my bank account. Auditor George has a huge problem with this, as it seems to defeat the spirit of budgetting but I assured her that this is a foolproof system. My old accounting strategy used to be “Is there money in my account? Check ATM for yes and cry inside for no.” I haven’t had a credit card in years, don’t have savings stashed away anywhere, so it’s WYSIWYG for my finances. Simple! I guess it hasn’t evolved much past that, but at least Budget Club has helped me track every penny.

Projecting into next year, my salary will stay the same but there’s no boost from outside income unless I can do something about it. Thus I need to get a book or something sold, as well as look for some other monies. Oh I could also try to grow the business too, that might be smart. Do more work at my current job, what a novel idea!

Things to Be Proud Of / Things to Work On
From January to December, I slashed $500 off my monthly variable budget. It seems somewhat conceivable that I could live on that lowered budget too because most of it is dining out bills. Time to learn to cook, or to just revert to eating corn/rice/tuna/pepper again. No, I must not do that, I’m a grown ass person who should eat things I enjoy. Bring on the Chinatown noodles and cheap dumplings. Five for a dollar!

I also think the best thing to do is to only do fun things when I make the extra money. My work salary should cover living expenses and stuff like that, while side hustle should fuel everything else. Vacations, shopping sprees, trips to the Equestria, all of it should come from an external place. Also: savings. I guess in theory I should try to save some money. They say that even saving $50-100 a month is something but I’ve always maintained that a thousand dollars won’t cover a catastrophe anyway so why not eat that double dessert now? The thing not to do is spend 25% of your expenditures on dining out though. I seriously spent just as much on eating out as I did on either play/travel/taxis or shopping/misc/grocery/gifts/household/subway/snacks/gas combined. Take your pick which option you’d prefer. I guess there’s a reason why the first tip for saving money is to start cooking. Sigh. I love eating out too.

Overall it was also good to have a sense of what I could be saving, or what a cut back on say, shopping or household might result in. It also helps to think that if I could make an extra $500 on something, what that could directly translate into. All in all, Budget Club was a fantastic experience and I loved recording every transaction. I started off using a combination of the Google Doc plus Mint but soon left Mint by the wayside to just use the Google Doc. It was more precise and easier to customize, plus having other Budget Clubbers be able to look at it was motivating. Here’s to another year of “better log it!” and keeping each other accountable for (over-)expenditures. Budget Club forever!