Life Summary
After declaring myself post-food and post-travel in 2024, I did indeed ingest less food and also went less places. Aside from a few jaunts to Los Angeles, there was only one trip: a short five day run to New York, mainly to get a tattoo. So after Taiwan in January, I was just in good old San Diego.
Did I succeed in making more money in 2024, as my resolution was? Heck no! Maybe next year… The biggest change in 2024 was more partying—which meant more alcohol I guess?—and a dramatic downswing in how much I spent on video games, mostly League of Legends. Still, there are cuts that could be made there. With 2025 around the corner, I have an idea of how the year will play out, but let’s look at last year first!
Month by Month Breakdown
- Jan: $3,250 (Offset -$2000)
- Feb: $2,900
- Mar: $2,500
- Apr: $2,500
- May: $2,300
- Jun: $2,200
- Jul: $2,700
- Aug: $2,700
- Sep: $2,500
- Oct: $2,300 (Offset $-400)
- Nov: $2,800
- Dec: $2,200
Variable Expenses
I averaged $2,600 variable expenses a month, lower than last year’s by three hundred dollars. That’s not far off my projected $2,500 per month budget and has to be my finest month by month ever! Granted, I did use two offsets for January and October, due to Taiwan (-$2000) and New York ($-400) respectively.
Note: I usually use “offset” to half out my vacation travel, and then add that half to Annual because I don’t want it to bloat my monthly but also don’t want to make it artificially low by throwing everything into Annual when I travel.
Barring January in Taiwan—which would have been $5,300 without the offset—every other month this year was under three thousand dollars! That's not too bad, and very consistent. I'll have to see how that falls in line with my pre-COVID monthly expenditures.
Six Big Categories
- 🥐 Food: $14,500
- 🏏 Shopping: $10,500
- 🪂 Play: $5,500
- ✈️ Transportation: $3,500
- 🎲 Hobbies: $2,500
- 🏠 House: $1,500
The old big four categories was expanded last year to add two more: hobbies and house. I realized my expenditure for games—mostly video—was skewing all my play and shopping stuff, so I wanted to break them out. The same thing with “house,” which I felt like deserved its own big category.
Despite going post-food from the beginning for 2024, I somehow spent more money on food in 2024 than in 2023. I’ll have to figure out why that was exactly. And with hobbies and house broken out, “shopping” somehow still went up by more than two thousand dollars. Again, an investigation must be done! The subsequent drop in “play” from 2023 to 2024 had to be mostly hobbies related I’m guessing.
In all, it was $35k in variable expenses, $12.5k fixed, and then $11k in annual expenses. Overall it amounts to $58,500 on the year and a lifestyle of $76,000 lifestyle pre-tax. And that’s with my $2000 mortgage wiped out. We’re gonna have to dig deeper into 2024 to figure out what in the world happened, as I barely traveled all year and was mostly home from what I recall! [Edit Dec 2025: I messed up the adding and changed the math, so now it's much lower than the previously estimated number.]
Food
An aside about food. I started tracking our groceries by line item after awhile because our bills were starting to get quite high. Like from a hundred and fifty or so to over two hundred regularly. Were prices actually getting higher? Or should we go to different grocery stores for lower prices? After some serious tracking, the short answer was: food costs are just higher.
I did split out grocery bills into actual groceries and household supplies—toilet paper, etc etc—and that helped to see what was happening, but overall, the extra fifty dollars spent per trip to the grocery store was mostly just an increase in prices over the year. The only cut we instituted was to eliminate getting a sumo citrus bag that was fifteen dollars. Back to regular oranges!
In addition, my goal this year was to spend less on paying for people when I eat with them—which I would say I do about half the time.
For my own personal food, I have a “dining out” tag, which resulted in $1,500 spent on the year. My “dining out shared” tag came to a grand total of $7,500 though.
I broke down those shared meals and it came down to: meals with my partner ($3,400), meals with friends ($2,300), and then a few instances of food with family or taking food over to Poway ($750).
In theory some of that is cuttable, but there were really only eleven instances where I paid for friends—aside from family or partners, or my one friend who was jobless for some time.
Somehow, food was thirty percent of my total expenditure this year, which seems in line with years prior, but I was hoping to be lower. I’ll have to battle that category yet again I suppose! Actually, that has to be wrong somehow...2023 was one-fifth of my money going to food, so that seems higher than quite a bit possibly.
Big Ticket Items
I broke out “big ticket items” to more categories, namely shopping, electronics, and play. You’ll see why below but mostly it was because “big ticket item” was starting to be too much of a catch all and I needed more specificity.
- Tattoo ($1,800)
- MacBook Air ($800)
- XG Concert ($450)
- O’Neil wetsuit ($150)
- BAB RISO Class ($150)
- Cotopaxi Allpa 20L ($150)
And then there were a few Target runs for stuffies and household things, that ran around one hundred and fifty dollars each. The big item was obviously the tattoo, my first since 2020. I’d been waiting for this artist since I discovered her last year—she lives in Hong Kong—and when I saw that she was going to be in New York, it seemed great timing to just go there and get it done.
Also, after an unconscionable amount of time, I upgraded my Mac Pro 2015 to a 2022 Air which was on mega-sale. That was my big electronics purchase this year and that means a new Mac, PC, iPad, and iPhone in the last two years. I should be good for awhile right?!
Along with all that, throw in some door covers for parties, a San Diego Wave game, a family time art Skate World, a terrible Candlelight concert, a train ride to Tainan, two Poway Adult School classes—for Procreate and Korean—and my Annual really had quite a bit in it this year. Note: I may not even be using “Annual” enough, as I found out George throws tons of stuff in there, like a whole lot!
In 2025, a new car is (finally) coming, and overall my house did quite well in its seventh year post-remodel. Nothing huge broke, yay! Oh wait, except for a massive water leak that cost maybe $1,000 extra in water bills, but hey, the water company gave me like two hundred dollars back so that’s sort of a win.
Looking forward for annual stuff, there’s a big Asia trip coming up, and possibly LASIK…
Trips
Oh, zero actual money was spent on flights this year, as I went to New York with miles. Airport taxis did cost five hundred though, between Taiwan and New York trips. Oh, I totally forgot I also went to Salt Lake City in March for a few days, but that was paid for by not me. And the only accommodations I paid for was two nights in Tainan ($250) and then one night in K-Town LA so we could rest after a party for about the same amount.
No comments:
Post a Comment