As always, below is my month-to-month variable expenses, and let’s just say that it started off swimmingly. I basically did nothing for the first two-and-a-half months of the year and came under budget in January, February, and March, which is a trifecta I don’t think I’ve ever achieved. I even cockily slashed my budget way down after January, thinking that I was doing a great job. By Apr-Jun though, my spending ways were back, and I slowly crept up in both over-budget percentage and actual numbers, all the way to a filthy November which cost me almost triple what January was, for some reason. I did finish up nicely thought, with a December, coming in at 92% on budget, but that was mostly due to being away for two weeks. And vacation, as we all know, goes under the annual "vacation" tab. Write it off!
- Jan: $1,100
- Feb: $950
- Mar: $1,050
- Apr: $1,450
- May: $1,500
- Jun: $1,600
- Jul: $1,900
- Aug: $2,050
- Sep: $2,300
- Oct: $2,250
- Nov: $3,200
- Dec: $1,550
The big four category breakdown goes like this:
- 🍜 Food: $11,600
- 🕹 Shopping: $5,400
- 🎡 Play: $3,700
- 🚗 Transportation: $3,400
As you can see, compared to last year, everything was way lower, excluding food, which remained about the same. On the year I spent about $42,650 including fixed, variable, and annual expenses. That’s almost exactly the same as last year. So again, I was living about a $55k lifestyle. However, I was living basically rent free from January through June, as we were remodeling the new/old house, so if I take into account what would have been the normal estimated fixed expenses for those months, including the mortgage/rent, it would be more like $55,250 and then a $72k lifestyle. Guess who needs to change everything when the house fully kicks in?!? Is it time to write a book?!
I spent about a thousand dollars on movies, $500 for various “events” (which include concerts, dance shows, plays, anything that requires a pre-bought ticket), a spiffy $775 on karaoke for the year, and most shockingly — although not that shocking really — about a thousand dollars on boba. Yes, boba! Compared to $400 for cigarettes on the year, let’s just say that it’s clear what my real addiction is. Also, I recategorized popcorn to category “play” under its own tag 🍿, since I consider popcorn to be part of the movie going process, and that totaled $250 for the year. In comparison, I spent a piddly $180 on drinks for the year.
As for shopping, I bought a PS4 this year, plus controllers and games, and then add in various iOS and board games I bought and we were looking at a $800 bill for “games” this year. Probably $100 of that probably went to Riot to feed my League of Legends addiction. For a game that I spent probably hundreds of hours on, this was the sweetest ROI of all.
Let’s see, what else... I spent $975 on clothing or clothing-related items, $450 on forty or so books, $425 on whatever comes under “beauty” (haircuts and contacts mostly), and I actually went to the doctor this year, to the tune of two visits each at $75. Car expenses came out to $150 for DMV registration, but that doesn’t account for car insurance.
Oh, subscriptions. I finally cancelled my Citibike Pass after years of not even living in New York, signed up for and then cancelled a rarely used Marvel Unlimited account, and am still subscribed to the usual assortment of URL and hosting services for web life, a couple of iOS subscriptions, NBA League Pass, Spotify, Netflix, and Stitcher. Biggest adds were subscriptions for 1Password (a lifesaver), YouTube Red, and recurring charges for the new camera monitoring set-up in my house. That all came out to about $110 a month. The saddest thing is that MoviePass never got back to me and with the huge price drop, I never even got my MoviePass to work out. So much for customer loyalty!
And let’s tackle the huge food category, which I smartly separated out this year into dining, dining shared, grocery, and snacks. A full 32% of my entire variable budget was spent on food, of which 22% of that was spent paying for myself and others. I’d been wondering how much I spend on just my food versus when I eat out with others and here was the answer: about two-thirds. It’s a small price to pay for good company and shared plates. Add in snacks and groceries and we have food all the way up to 46% of my variable money spent. Even with a healthy diet of Soylent, most of my money went to food, as per usual. Can we just, like, not eat already?
Travel wise, again, I didn’t go too many places and so we’re looking at a total of $1,800 on flights, $625 on hotels, and that encompasses a weekend wedding in Oakland ($450), a few days in Joshua Tree ($175), ten days in New York ($1,175) and another two weeks there ($1,750). Oh wait, flights is super high because I bought a ticket to Taipei for $600 that doesn’t deliver until January 2018. And somehow taxis cost me $975 for the year, which I’d guess is trip related, and public transportation was a piddly $75 in total. Let's hope that number goes up next year as it means I'll be scooting around in foreign subways.
Also, an unexpected expense was a new passport and visas for my upcoming Asia jaunt. Apparently you can’t just add new pages to your passport anymore so a new passport, two visas, and finally getting on the Global Entry program set me back $1,450. Such is the price of escape right? Oh and most importantly I racked up 64,500 reward points on my Chase card — remember my newfound obsession with reward cards right around this time last year? — and am now armed with almost one "get out of jail free" card to anywhere. Whew!
As always, if you want to start a budget club of your very own, here's the open template, and if you need help customizing it, do tell!
