Thriftism's Monthly Budget - September Report

Almost done with October and I'm finally putting out our September report. Sorry for the delay. Are we still staying within our thrifty budget?  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. We haven't adjusted other budget items, though as you'll see when you continue reading, we probably should have adjusted at least the phone and the utilities. 

WINS ✅

We barely shopped for groceries this month as we used up garden produce and ate lots of sandwiches. Since we make our own bread this keeps our grocery costs extremely low! We had another good month for eating out. We were able to reduce our monthly average again.

The only entertainment spending we had this month was Netflix. With Race working many weekends and working on the house the remaining days, we didn't have time to do too much. We didn't buy any clothing in September and kept our miscellaneous spending to nothing. This helped us lower us monthly averages to be on track or almost on track for all three areas.

We stayed well under budget on household supplies this month! 

Car insurance wasn't due this month, so our monthly average is below the budgeted amount. We also didn't have any vehicle maintenance and did relatively little driving keeping fuel costs low as well.

With very little medical costs incurred this month, we were able to stay on budget. We had some prescription and over the count drug costs, but we are still bringing down our monthly averages. 

We saved big money this month!! Even on this low budget we saved 30% of our income. Looks like another trip is on our horizon. 

NEEDS WORK ❌

Our utilities have been high all  year. Inflation is finally catching up to us. I have had the same utility budget for 5 years and with annual increase of up to 8% in all of our utilities we aren't able to keep it within this budget anymore. Plus, I no longer want to sit in a steamy or freezing house. We had high temps all summer (higher than average) followed by extremely low temps (we had snow in September 😢 ). This led to higher than expected utility costs.

Our phone bill went over again this month too and will continue to do so until the end of the year. I likely should re-budget to account for this, but our average will be under the annually budgeted amount, so it will be fine if we go over in the coming months. 

LAST THOUGHTS

We still went over budget in a two categories, but stayed under overall. We were able to increase our savings a lot and get back on track for the year. We actually have been saving over 30% of my income for this budget (in addition to Race's income). We are around $110 under for the year (balance or $0 is the goal). Since we had excess, this money increased our savings. Still doubting our budget? Keep following along. 

Be sure to check our the Thriftism YouTube Channel for spending updates and budget report videos!