July Expenses – $2134.57

Here is a breakdown of my expenses for July.

My expenses in July were a little higher than I prefer.  We had free rent this month due to a move-in special.  We just had to pay pro-rated rent for the last week of June.  Since we didn’t have rent to pay I used the extra money to pay off my credit card debt.  The debt was from using a 0% credit card balance transfer to pay down my student loans.  I was able to roll this debt over at 0% a couple of times but decided it was time to get rid of it.  It seemed like a good idea at the time to use the transfer to reduce the amount of my student loans but since then they changed the rules for paying back my loan making it no longer a good deal.

Household expense will be up this month since we have to pay rent.  Cable/internet will also be up since we had a free month of that.  On the plus side there won’t be any debt payment.  I would also like to reduce our food bill to under $300.  This shouldn’t be too hard since we get a lot of free meals from mystery shopping.  It would also be good to reduce our transportation expense.  We spent almost $400 on gas in July due to trips to Kansas City and Jeff City, in addition to lots of mystery shopping trips.  We don’t have any long trips planned this month and we’re trying to be more selective on mystery shopping trips since the gas expense is seriously reducing our profits.  My goal for this month is to get our expenses under $2000 and I’d like to eventually get them under $1750 a month on a consistent basis.