Life Summary
2025 was a year of big change in my financial life. For one, I vowed to shop less, to buy less, and really, to expend less. Also, I got married! With that marriage came shared bills and shared expenses across the board, and toward that end we opened a joint checkings account about a year ago.
That means my overall numbers are slashed from 2024, however I’m trying to figure out how to adjust and reflect my individual and shared expense sheets to still come up with my normal expenditure numbers. On with the show!
Month by Month Breakdown
- Jan: $1,500
- Feb: $1,100
- Mar: $1,700
- Apr: $2,000 (Offset -$1000)
- May: $1,300 (Offset -$1000)
- Jun: $1,500
- Jul: $1,000
- Aug: $1,800
- Sep: $1,000
- Oct: $1,300
- Nov: $1,100
- Dec: $1,000
Total Variable Expense: $16,500
Annual Expenses: $21,000
Total Variable + Annual Expenses: $37,500
Variable Expenses
I averaged about $1,350 in monthly variable expenses in 2025, which sounds much lower than last year’s $2,600, but that then has to account for how much Slushy and I spent jointly.
Looking at our new shared expenses sheet, that comes out to roughly $800 per month each—which included bills though and other fixed expenses. Cleaning service, water, gas/electric, and internet cost $600 a month, give or take, but those were filed under fixed expenses. Taking out bills then, we shared about $500 worth of expenses a month each.
So, using that +$500 number, if we add it back in to my 2025 monthly variable, I averaged about $1,850 per month on variable expenses. That’s not too bad, and a big decrease overall from 2024!
Big Six Categories
Individual
- Food: $6,500
- Shopping: $5,500
- Play: $3,000
- Transportation: $2,300
- Hobbies: $1,000
- House: $500
For 2025, I expanded the big four categories to include hobbies and house. I also need to add in shared expenses for these categories, which I’ll do below.
Shared Expenses
- Food: $7,000
- Shopping: $400
- Play: $1,000
- Transportation: $400
- Hobbies: $0
- House: $1000
If we halve those amounts to account for my half, then I actually spent:
Individual + Shared
- Food: $6,500 + 3,000
- Shopping: $5,500 + $200
- Play: $3,000 + $500
- Transportation: $2,300 + $200
- Hobbies: $1,000 + $0
- House: $500 + $500
Note I’m showing the math for this year, but in the future I’ll probably just combine them as we go.
Individual + Shared, Clean
- 🥐 Food: $9,500
- 🏏 Shopping: $5,700
- 🪂 Play: $3,500
- ✈️ Transportation: $2,500
- 🎲 Hobbies: $1,000
- 🏠 House: $1,000
So, compared to last year, I dropped my food by a whole lot, slashed my shopping by half, and also played less, hobby-ed way less, and spent one thousand dollars less on transportation. In fact, I went from $38,000 spent on these six categories in 2024 to $23,200 total in 2025.
What a savings! I was down in every category except Annual actually.
In all, it was $23,00 in variable expenses, $4,500 in fixed, $10,000 shared expenses, and $14,000 in annual expenses. Total: $51,000 for 2025. So times 1.3x for presumptive taxes, I’m living a $66,000 lifestyle? Does that sound right?
Also caveat: I need to note that I do not pay for property tax, a mortgage, health insurance, or car insurance, so that’s a hefty bill that is paid elsewhere.
What was in that huge Annual number?
Our Asia trip encompassed some of it, as there were flights, accommodations, and extra traveling fun stuff. It was about $5,700 total for the Asia trip. (We spent $18,500 total on the trip, but that’s a post for another time.)
Nothing went wrong with the house this year, minus a minor door thing ($300), but my car brakes did need fixing, which was $850 spent on car maintenance.
And $4,000 in medical, which was a huge outlier because I’d not really been to the doctor in years. But this past year, I went a lot to get everything checked up, highlighted by my first colonoscopy ($750) and a whole slew of testing.
Big Ticket Items
Nothing to really write home about, minus two tattoos I got in Asia, totaling $700. Aside from that, I put about $300 into ukuleles and equipment, as my mom, Slushy, and I are starting a music ensemble. Slushy paid for two of the ukuleles though, otherwise that number would’ve been $500.
Oh, my wedding suit was $75 from Amazon?
For a very detailed look at my 2025 shopping, here is this post: Shopping 2025 Review.
Trips
There weren’t many trips this year, just one big one: Asia in April/May, where we went from Tokyo, Taiwan, Korea, and London. As mentioned above, I ran the calculations post-trip and we spent $18,500 total on those six weeks.
I also went to Mexico, Zihuatanejo, in February for about a week, and also Michigan for about three weeks in July. Those were paid for though, so I didn’t spend much if anything at all.
Oh wait, we also went to Vegas for our honeymoon, and that was $2,500 for three nights of fun fun fun!
Category and Tags Review
Dining Out Shared dropped dramatically, partly due to it just dropped as I ate out less, and also much of our shared food moved to our shared expenses. Same with grocery and house supplies, stuff like that. My own dining out was still about the same, a hundred dollars a month. Also, I’ve cut my boba down dramatically, from the many years average of a thousand dollars to just $350 last year!
Snacks still stayed steady though, at about a thousand dollars, so I should look to slash that in half too. After all, 2026 will be the year of my improving health, so snacks of all kinds must be reduced!
Somehow “play” leapt up from $700 to over two thousand dollars, which I’ll assume is the Asia trip and just moving around the type of play I had. For example, alcohol and vents both dropped dramatically—party stayed the same though. Also, movies in the theater tanked hard too, going from $650 to $250, which is twenty less movies a year. That’s likely due to the quality of movies in the theater? Also, theater viewing equals popcorn and Slurpees, both of which I’m trying to cut out!
We’ll get into shopping in-depth at this post, but suffice to say, a huge cut from $5,600 in 2024 to $1,700 this year must mean something! We’ll take a closer look in another post as we reflect on this 2024 post about shopping.
And it can’t be overlooked that LOL/Snap went from $1,650 to $400 over this past year. That means there’s room for another all encompassing video game?! No?
Oh this is untagged and not even on my expenses sheet, but we spent $800 on couples therapy through the year—at $60 per session—and we loved it!
That’s it for specific tags analysis!
New Categories and Tags
Through the power of Chat GPT, I changed and revamped my categories and tags.
Mostly the big ones stayed the same, but I did add an umbrella category for travel, that was broken down into “TRA Accommodations, TRA Flights, TRA Travel,” etc. Aside from that I added “Exercise” as a tag, took out LOL/Snap since I’m no longer playing those as often, and added “Hair” because I wanna see how much I spend on hair-related stuff. See below for two tags suggested by Chat GPT and its explanations:
- Admin = expected-but-rare paperwork
- Other = weird life curveballs
Admin (Annual) is for the occasional, boring-but-official fees you pay just to function inside systems — things like government documents, identity paperwork, licensing, banking or legal filing costs, and other institutional fees that aren’t fun, optional, or recurring monthly. It’s not travel, medical, shopping, or repairs — it’s simply the cost of being a documented, registered adult every once in a while.
Other (Annual) is your safety-net category for rare, meaningful expenses that don’t clearly belong anywhere else and aren’t likely to repeat every year. These are the unusual life events, one-off situations, or unexpected costs that aren’t travel, medical, car, house, admin, or big-ticket purchases — but are still significant enough that you don’t want them buried in monthly spending. It’s the flexible bucket for “life happened, and this didn’t fit anywhere else.”
Admin (Tag) is for small-to-medium everyday expenses related to life logistics and paperwork — the practical costs of managing accounts, documents, scheduling, mailing forms, small bank or processing fees, and other boring-but-necessary tasks. It isn’t fun or emotional spending, and it’s not big or rare enough to be an Annual Admin expense — it’s simply the regular cost of being a functioning adult in systems.
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