Ways and Means: 2018 Recap

Here we go, the 2018 expense report! Unlike last year, where I stayed home most of the year, 2018 was a year of travels as I sojourned to Asia from January until June, and then was in New York on and off for a bit, with a final trip back to Asia for December. Was it costly? You betcha! Did it wreck havoc on my budget? You betcha again! We’ll take a look at how much I spent this year overall, with a special emphasis on my travels.

As usual, we’ll start with my month-to-month variable expenses. I only came under budget in two months, February and October. February I was mostly in Bali where it’s cheap and October I was holed up in my house, write writing away and never leaving the house. Otherwise, I blew past my variable expenses budget each month, sometimes to outrageous sums. My average budget for a month was $1,700 in variable expenses and I ended up spending $2,600 instead. Whoops.

The outrageous months were April, June, August, and December. Respectively those accounted for the time I spent in Tokyo, New York, New York again, and Singapore. You’ll note that also doubles as a nice list of expensive places to be. But I’m young and free and I was going to blow all my money having fun this year! Below is my variable expenses by the month.

• Jan: $2,900
• Feb: $1,550
• Mar: $2,050
• Apr: $3,400
• May: $2,350
• Jun: $3,250
• Jul: $3,300
• Aug: $2,900
• Sep: $2,400
• Oct: $1,350
• Nov: $2,250
• Dec: $3,850

The big four category breakdown goes like this:

• 🥟 Food: $13,650
• 👕 Shopping: $9,800
• 🎨 Play: $4,750
• 🏎 Transportation: $4,600

Inevitably that combined number was way higher than last year -- about $24,000 versus $33,000 -- as I was out and about. Last year I spent an estimated $55k on fixed, variable, and annual expenses. That figure shot up to $70k this year as pparently leaving the house to go outside is an expensive exploit. Fortunately, I also made some (largely unexpected) money too, which I’ll get into later.

And of course this all takes into account paying the faux-mortgage for my lovely newish house that I didn’t even live in for half the year, choosing instead to spend lots of dollars living in AirBnbs in foreign cities. Overall, that $70k figure translates to a $91k lifestyle. Not even six figures! What are people doing with their huge incomes? Oh right, they have adult responsibilities like car payments, insurance, savings, and retirement. None of which I have!

Usually I dive into individual tags but first I’ll look at how much travel cost me this year. See below for the seven major trips I took this year, along with their costs and number of nights spent somewhere. Each trip figure includes airfare, taxis to and from airport, accommodations, food, play, etc. And in some cases it involved paying for travel partners too.

• Tokyo: $8,900 / 35 nights
• Singapore: $5,400 / 16
• NYC 1: $4,350 / 19
• NYC 2: $3,100 / 14
• Vietnam: $2,300 / 13
• Phillipines: $2,050 / 6
• Bali: $2,000 / 14

Overall that’s about $28,000 for seven trips and 117 nights away from “home.” A useless number but that averages out to be $250 per night. How much does it cost to stay home? Sadly, not free but it’s certainly lower than that number. During travel, I broke down my expenses into these five categories:

• Accommodations: $10,200
• Flights: $8,000
• Airport Taxis: $700
• Travel Misc: $450
• Luggage Fees: $400

I’m not exactly sure why “luggage fees” is so high. Keep in mind that I also wrote off some of my travel, as well as my research trip to Singapore, which was handy for final accounting.

For once, “dining out” was not my highest tag, as “accommodations” and “flights” eclipsed that number. However, if I add up “dining” and “dining out / shared” then it would have tied with “accommodations” for highest tag.

As for addictions, my cigarette expenditures stayed about even but my boba expense dropped from almost a grand to just under eight hundred dollars! I still spent more on boba than groceries though, haha. I also watched way fewer movies this year, but still managed to hit $800 for movies/popcorn combined. And my drinking doubled to about four hundred dollars total. My karaoke expenses also jumped up, but mainly due to paying for my fortieth birthday singing party, which was worth every penny.

Last year I bought a PS4 and this year I bought a Nintendo Switch, and with that included in, I spent about a thousand each on games and the nebulous “digital” tag. I also doubled my clothing up to almost two thousand dollars spent, plus books bought also doubled from five hundred to a thousand dollars.

Oh yeah, taxis was a huge expense this year, as I spent a lot of time zipping around in them, to the tune of about $3,500. That is 5.75% of my overall spending! And that doesn’t even include the $700 in airport taxis I took. The good news is that I had property tax and house insurance to factor in, which was about a cool $8,000 off the bottom line that I totally forgot about.

Finally, my subscriptions increased from about $110 per month to $150, as I added two house related subscriptions for my alarm system and camera monitoring. And since I still haven’t joined a gym, that expense remains “pending.” 💪

So how did I spend all this money yet keep on rolling? Well, the simple answer is that I had some of the travel reimbursed, plus tax return, and then I actually managed to follow through and use my writing as supplemental/fun money. My friend totally hooked it up and optioned my first book, which translated to some nice money, and then I sold a book, which I’m partially counting for 2018 so that, um, I can keep my accounting books clean. So sort of through no effort of my own, and some actual effort in writing, I’ll be entering 2019 cramming my butt off to pay off the traveling debt that I accrued in 2018! Bon voyage and don't forget to start a budget club of your very own!