Welcome to my monthly spending and budget update where I review our monthly expenses and expenditures. November 2024 was a busy month. I started back at work after my maternity leave, we visited family, saw friends, celebrated Thanksgiving over two back to back days which overwhelmed our baby. Anyways, I think we started to successfully cut back spending a little but I’ll get into detail later on.
How we track all of our spending:
We put everything we can onto credit cards each month and at the end of each month, we pay them off in full. This not only allows us to easily track our spending but also to get rewards points. Again, we only do this because we can pay these cards off every month and don’t carry any credit card debt.
At the end of each month, we have our budget meeting where we input all of our spending into our spreadsheet budget and look at our budget for the current and next month. We also look at each account and add them all up to track our net worth (including debt).
A few notes about our finances:
- We are both renters and homeowners. We own a rental home (our home that we intended to live in long term out of state before moving back to the Bay Area). We make a small profit every month. We also happen to be renters in our current home in the Bay Area. This is largely due to the ridiculously expensive housing market here. We simply can’t afford to buy and that’s ok.
- I leave these amounts out for privacy but our rent is roughly 30% of our take home pay. I also leave out our pay for privacy.
- We have joint finances but both get individual spending money each month. Whatever is unused goes into individual sinking funds for a rainy day.
- We are not overly frugal and you may disagree with our spending but we are mostly comfortable with what we spend each month.
- My husband works fully remote and I’m 50/50 hybrid. My commute is also short and we have a plug-in hybrid (partially electric vehicle) for our daily driver. That is why our gas bill is typically very low.
| Item/Category | Money Spent | Notes |
| Gas (fuel) | $48 | |
| Car Payments | $1,071 | Payments for 2 cars – oofWe’ll be looking to pay one of these off early hopefully in 2025 |
| Utilities | $422 | Trash, electricity, etc |
| Internet | $50 | |
| Groceries | $617 | |
| Insurance | $350 | Term life, auto, and renters insurance |
| Spotify | $19 | Music family plan |
| Mic Fun Spending | $261 | Ipad accessories, hair cut, etc |
| Husband Fun Spending | $90 | Hobby fun |
| Fun/Misc Spending | $924 | Family pjs & gifts |
| Dog | $211 | Vet visit |
| Baby | $588 | Diapers, formula, clothes, etc |
| Restaurants/Take Out | $244 | |
| House | $48 | Pest control |
| Medical | $700 | Paying out of pocket for therapy |
| Cars | $150 | |
| Audible | $15 | |
| Travel: | $733 | Flights and a rental car for Hawaii |
| Total: | $6,541 |
Areas we were over or under budget:
- Under budget – Groceries!
- We budgeted more due to the holiday but ended up under budget. We’re buying less convenience foods and cooking from scratch more often.
- Under budget – Restaurants/Take Out
- We budgeted more than usual for our dining out line item and I cannot recall why. But, we came in under budget.
- Under budget – Baby
- All of the baby essentials but I spent less time online shopping for extras. We have everything we need.
- Over budget – Utilities
- Electricity in California is very expensive and our heat has been on.
- Over budget – Insurance
- We bought a new car in October so our insurance went up by a little bit.
- Over budget – Dog
- Surprise vet visit and medication for our dog who is allergic to everything!
- Over budget – Fun/Misc Spending
- We bought almost all of our holiday gifts in November instead of December and it added up.
All in all, we did start to cut back in November in the categories we wanted to. We did see some lifestyle inflation due to our car purchase (finance) in October but we knew that was coming. In 2025, our goals are to make a good dent at the smaller of our two auto loans and continue to try to live more frugally. November had some budget outliers like holiday gifts and family PJs that aren’t recurring purchases which should make December better. We do spend a lot but we are comfortable with what we spend. We have lived uber frugally in the past but now we don’t and that’s ok.
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