Andy Hough

Here is a breakdown of my expenses for August.

I’m very pleased with my expense results for August.  If you take out the amount for debt repayment my expenses were well under 50% of my income. This is the kind of month I’ve been wanting to have since I started tracking my expenses.  There were no unusual expenses this month such as car repair or dental bills like I have been occurring. Unfortunately I won’t be able to repeat this since I have a traffic ticket, car repair, and quarterly health insurance bill to pay for this month.

I’m going to try again to reduce my food bill.  I was very close to my budgeted amount of $100 but I think I can spend less.  A large percentage of my food budget is spent on impulse junk food purchases.  If I can eliminate or reduce these purchases my food budget should go down plus I’ll be healthier.  Since I work in a pizza restaurant I need to take advantage of the free food available to me and use that to satisfy my junk food cravings.  Entertainment should stay low because I received a $50 AMC gift card for opening a bank account. Also I stopped seeing the woman I was dating so there won’t be any expense there.  Debt reduction will probably also be less since my other expenses will leave me with less available to pay on debt.

Here is a breakdown of my income for August.

My income for September should be roughly the same. The medical study has ended so I won’t have that income. My interest income has almost disappeared because I ended my credit card arbitrage.  The other categories shouldn’t change much.

The 60% solution is a budgeting method I’ve seen mentioned on a couple of blogs. The basic concept is to limit your committed expenses to 60% or less of your total income.  Then commit 10% each to retirement savings, long-term savings, short-term savings for irregular expenses, and fun money.  Looking at my budget for last month my committed expenses are quite easily under the 60% limit.  I don’t actually follow the 10% guidelines for what to do with the rest of my money but as the article indicates once you have your committed expenses at 60% it is simple to save money.

Since I have a lot of debt to repay I don’t think the 10% guidelines work too well for me.  Right now I just put as much extra money as I can towards debt.  Since I’m frugal I don’t worry that I’ll waste my money without specific guidelines on where to spend it.  I use Pear Budget to do my budget and it works fine for my simple needs.  I use it more as a way to track my income and expenses than as an actual budget.