Thriftism's Monthly Budget - May Report

Happy June! With a new month rolling around, that means we need another budget update. For a quick reminder, we run our budget solely on my income of $2,400/month which gives us a gross income of $31,200. We do not include health insurance in our budget as ours is currently covered by our jobs, but if this was our household income we would also be taken care of by insurance subsidies. We do not include all discretionary spending such as traveling or major home renovations, but we do include all entertainment, grocery, dining out, and every day expenses. It is our essentials budget that we live on before adding in trips! If we can do it, so can you!

The Budget

Our goal budget is balanced with total income minus expenses equal to zero. Numbers in red are expenditures, while black is income. The green background indicates under budget. Red squares point out our overspending. 

We did change up the budget a bit to reflect that the student loan is paid off. We split that amount between miscellaneous expenses and increased the savings goal. 

WINS ✅

We had another good month for groceries and eating out. Our monthly average is now below $200 for groceries and while we still have some work to do, we are heading in the right direction. We didn't really eat out, but did enjoy some ice cream and snow cones over Memorial weekend to help cool off from the 100 degree Fahrenheit days. 

We didn't buy any clothing in May and our only entertainment spending was on Netflix. We did have miscellaneous spending, but remained under budget. This helped us lower us monthly averages to be on track or almost on track for all three areas.

Our household spending was under budget this month too! Finally we had a month with our utilities under budget. We were almost $30 under budget which helped lower our monthly average. We will need to keep doing this to balance out for the year - this may be difficult as our internet cost is increasing by 8% this year. The mortgage actually decreased this month. We had planned that it would increase with increased taxes, but our bank didn't estimate our escrow correctly last year which means we don't have to pay as much each month! Our home supplies was also under budget and lowered our monthly average.  

We didn't have to pay for car insurance this month or any maintenance meaning we were under budget! We will have an expense in June due to purchasing a car in May. We didn't include the car purchase in our budget. For anyone who thinks we aren't sharing enough to make the budget work, we did spend $2,900 on a "new to us" car. This can partially come out of the savings within this budget and our lowered mortgage payments. We determined this was discretionary as we didn't 100% need this car, it was just more convenient to have a car with air conditioning. 😄  When we sell the old car, this will help offset the car cost further.

NEEDS WORK ❌

Our fuel charges were slightly over budget this month. This was because I drove to the Cities once this month vs Race driving home (work reimbursements cover his fuel). Fuel prices in our area (and likely others as well) have gone up very quickly as well and were not accounted for in our budget. Next month, we should be under budget as we are not currently planning any long distance driving.

We did not need prescriptions this month, but I have continued buying Zyrtec to combat allergies. We did find that Target sells Zyrtec for around $2 cheaper than regular pharmacies so that saved us a little bit this month. Generally we were on track and we should be on track for the year. The area we were off on was co-payments. I had an annual skin check since I am so fair skinned and have loads of 'spots'.  The costs were higher this year as I switched to a high deductible plan, however, everything was paid for out of my HSA which is partially funded by my employer, so this didn't have a real effect on the budget, but I did want to include all out of pocket costs to show that it can be done on a restrictive budget.

LAST THOUGHTS