Thriftism's Monthly Budget - March Report

It's time for another monthly budget update!! We missed doing a YouTube video on this so far, but we made it happen this month. For a quick reminder, we run our budget solely on my income of $2,400/ month or $1,200 every other week. This would be a gross income of $31,200. We do not include health insurance costs on here as we are currently covered by our jobs, but we also don't include potential costs as if you were a married couple making $31,200/ year, you would qualify for free or nearly free health insurance. This budget also doesn't include most of our discretionary spending such as travel and home renovations, but does include all of our entertainment and eating out costs. It is our essentials budget that we could live on without any additional spending.

The Budget

Our goal budget is balanced with total income minus expenses equal to zero. Numbers in red are spending, while black is income. The green background indicates under on within the budget. Red filled squares point out our overspending. We also have included a monthly average column to show if our highs and lows balance out for the year. 

Wins✅

Our grocery spending continued to be extremely low. This is still due in large part to our stocking up when Sam's Club closed. Our average for the year is slowly dropping and we are just under $260/month for groceries. We plan for this to be under our monthly goal of $135 by year end. 

Our phone spending was under again. This was the residual comp money from when we activated Race's phone at the end of January. This will be back to normal next month.

Cars stayed under budget this month. No maintenance and infrequent driving kept costs low. Race gets reimbursed for much of his mileage and for this reason we chose not to include his work fuel costs. We do need to purchase new tabs next month, so we will be maxing out the maintenance budget in April.

We were just under for entertainment costs and brought down our monthly average for clothing and home supplies. We will be using our stock from January for much of the year.  Medical costs went down this month too as we are finally (fingers crossed) illness free.

MAJOR WIN ✅✅

NO MORE STUDENT LOANS!!! We were able to make the last payment on our student loans in March. This is huge for the budget as it frees up almost 5% of our budget. This shows how important it is to get rid of debt when you are living on a tight budget. Without the loan payment, we can double our savings to $200/month or $2,400/year. That would put us at being able to save 8% of income and can add up quickly in a retirement account, emergency fund, or that may be enough to pay for a trip for those of you who want more fun spending. I would recommend putting this money into a retirement account or emergency fund if you are only making $31,200/year to set yourself up better for the future. See calculations below (this doesn't include an employer match and uses a very modest return of 6%). 

Example Calculations

Contributions: $2,400/Year

# Years Contributing: 30

Rate of Return: 6%

Future Value: $189,739.65

While this may not be enough to fully retire on, it's much better than seeing a 0. Plus if you've invested this in a Roth account, it is tax free.

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT ❌

We ate out way too many times this month. This was unusual for us, but had many events that involved eating out. A few of these were St. Patrick's Day, Mom's birthday, Brother-in-law passed his boards, and getting together with friends. We should have planned better to avoid spending so much, but since we were able to balance the overall monthly budget, we knew we could join in. This is the benefit to being flexible, but we also did stay under budget for the month. Don't go over budget for the month because you needed to eat out, that is when we say no and invite people over instead.

Utilities are still over. Will it ever warm up? We had extremely cold weather for another month. If we can avoid using air conditioning for a large portion of the summer, the utility budget should balance out. If not, we will cut back in another area to make up for overruns in utilities. Utilities are much more important than miscellaneous spending or dining out.

Speaking of miscellaneous spending, we also went over on this in March. This was also due to previously stated events. 

LAST THOUGHTS

We did go over budget in a few areas, but managed to underspend in many other categories to bring us under budget for the month. We reduced our deficit for the year to $107.24 or $35.75/month as shown above. With a few more low spending months, we will be on track for the year. We weren't able to erase the deficit this month, but we should be able to get there in April. 

I know we said we are going to report everything we bought in March (and I kept forgetting to do that), but we will try again this month and bring you weekly updates. Be sure to join us on our YouTube Channel for updates.