Our September Spending – A Quick Look Back

One of the things I was really looking forward to doing at the end of September was compare our current spending with our prior-month spending. The challenge, if you’ll remember, is to spend somewhere between no more than $3,000 and $3,500 each month. We actually have our monthly spending much more exact than this, but we’re also aware that expenses fluctuate, and there are things you just can’t predict. This should help us to stay within the $40,000 limit that we have set for ourselves for a full year of spending.

Generally, we stayed right on track for the budget! Our total spending (minus small odds and ends from Venmo or other small transactions) was right at $3,200!

That’s good news, because in the course of evaluating our expenses for September, I decided to just look at the entire year-to-date spending for our house, and it was a DOOZY. Let me tell you something: if you haven’t taken a hard look at your actual spending in a while, line by line, I suggest you do so.

Our average monthly spending for the 2019 year so far (not counting September) was $6,450! Simply by virtue of actively, intentionally paying attention to our spending, we dropped our monthly expenses by $3,200. In case you’re not paying attention that is fully half of what we spent this month. That is insane. Want to know what the biggest culprits were? Here’s a breakdown, just looking at the prior three months of spending on the categories with the biggest differences.

• July
  • Eating Out – $683.21
  • Groceries – $634.04
• August
  • Eating Out – $887.85
  • Groceries – $973.45
• September
  • Eating Out – $4.82 (!!!!!!!)
  • Groceries – $493.45

Eating out and groceries. Just by paying attention and being more intentional, we spent $1360 less on FOOD. By the way, that September grocery budget even included a Costco trip, which is usually a big-ticket item for us.

These number differentials are both encouraging and infuriating, if I’m honest. It’s encouraging because it means that math that we did last month should be relatively solid. We really can do this if we put our mind to it. It’s infuriating because we could have been doing this all along. It’s so easy to get caught up in the mindset of making more and spending more. But if we had tried to live more simply when our incomes were higher with both of us working full time, we could have no mortgage right now, or a bigger savings account, or (fill in the blank).

Here’s the thing — it probably won’t always be like this. We just had a big expense come up for our car (new tires) that added up to about $750. We’ll have other things come up too. But if, on average, we stay within this $3,200 range, we’ll do better than our yearly goal of spending no more than $40,000 within the year.

I want to emphasize that we weren’t living on scraps over here. Our diet consists mainly of whole foods, fresh fruits, vegetables, and minimally processed foods. We love to cook and bake and don’t skimp on high quality products! So by reducing our spending we weren’t reducing our quality of life. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. In future posts I’ll talk about some of the fun we’ve had recently as well including a Texas Rangers game, the State Fair of Texas, two date nights, and my adventures in sourdough baking.