Protected: March Updates
March 31, 2021
Protected: April Updates
April 28, 2021
We have been using YNAB to budget and track expenses since we got married, but we haven’t really done deep dives on where the spending is going. Anyone with kids knows, daycare is expensive. I’ve been going through our budget quite a bit lately to to find places to tweak to fit a second kiddo in there, so thought it would be good to lay out what we have been spending on and where we might be able to cut back.
At the beginning of the year we met with a financial advisor and started putting money into a brokerage account and other avenues of savings as well, so that is now a decent chunk of our ‘spending’. This also doesn’t include contributions to 401k’s, health insurance premiums, etc. that are taken out of our paychecks. Since we will have quite a bit of medical costs this year with kiddos, etc., I have been including the payments we make from our HSAs in here just for tracking purposes, not that we can really cut that back but it’s nice to have the awareness.
Spending
- Home (22.58%) – Right now, this is our largest expense since our mortgage is coming out of it. We also still are using the house cleaning service once a month, but that is definitely helping our sanity with two kids.
- Long Term Savings (21.42%) – We met with a financial advisor at the beginning of the year and set up a brokerage account. We made a large lump sum contribution to it out of our savings account, so that’s why there are two graphs. One include it and the other doesn’t. The percentages for this reporting are based on not including the lump sum since we won’t be able to make that large of a contribution on an ongoing basis, so wanted to exclude it for comparison purposes. We also have long term disability and life insurance premiums coming out of this category as well as college savings. This will probably increase because we are adding on Miles and Hailey’s life insurance premiums starting later this year. That feels so morbid typing that, but it’s just another avenue of saving.
- Daycare (15.82%) – This is going to increase this year with two kids going to daycare in October-ish.
- Food (12.36%) – We need to probably pull back on our dining out expenses. I get expensive coffees a lot too so I will need to start to cut back those as well. I have an espresso machine at home, but for some reason nothing beats one that someone else makes for you 🙂
- Health, Wellness & Fitness (7.79%) – This originally was a huge chunk since I had purchased the Peloton Bike AND Treadmill in this quarter, but since the treadmill got recalled, we got the treadmill refund. Depending on the fix, this might shoot up again later this year if we end up buying it.
- Monthly Bills (4.48%)
- Shopping (4.25%) – This category was a little high due to paying off our cell phones with T-Mobile. The nice thing about this is that our phone bill will now go down!
- Miles Wayne (1.61%) – We bought a used Snoo this quarter, so even though he wasn’t born yet, he got some big expenses charged to him
- Hailey Joy (1.57%)
- Pets (1.56%)
- Travel (1.54%) – I purchased the tickets for the Crossfit Games in this quarter and budgeted it towards travel since we are making a trip of it
- Vehicle (1.48%)
- Yearly/Semi Yearly Bills/Subscriptions (1.31%)
- Entertainment (1.20%)
- Medical (1.03%)