Expense/Income Tracking

Tracking Every Penny and My Non Budget

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Over at My Two Dollars last week David wrote a post arguing against what he called “Watching Every Last Penny Syndrome.” Since I track every penny I spend and earn I have to disagree with that post. This is something I started doing after reading “Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence” and I’ve found it very helpful and pretty easy to do. Apparently Trent at The Simple Dollar keeps track of every penny too.

That being said I don’t budget every penny. I just keep track of what I spend and when my spending gets out of line in a certain category I adjust my spending accordingly.  Stephanie at Poorer than You uses a similar system and Nick at Punny Money has his own variation of the system. This system works well for me but it won’t work for everybody. You need to determine what kind of budgeting system works best for you.

March Expenses

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Here is a breakdown of my expenses for March:

Household

$378

Utilities

$107.11

Transportation

$151.90

Entertainment

$335.85

Food

$121.96

Student loans

$100

Health Insurance/Medical

$170.22

Total

$1365.04

 

My expenses are too high mainly because of my entertainment expense.  I really need to cut that one back.  My health insurance is paid for three months so I shouldn’t have any medical expense this month. Other categories should be roughly the same. My goal is to get my expenses under $1000 a month not counting what I pay towards my student loans.

March Income

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Here is a breakdown of my income for March.

Online Income

$115.69

Survey

$5

Interest

$69.43

Tax Refund

$133.93

Total

$324.05

 

My online income came down a lot but I’m still happy with it.  I’m on track to make a lot more than last year.  My interest income is high because I’m including ING Direct referral bonuses.  April will be another low income month but in May I’ll return to work and start making some decent money.

February Expense

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Here is a breakdown of my expenses for February:

Household

$382.10

Utilities

$118.68

Transportation

$623.49

Entertainment

$536.83

Food

$110.06

Education/Student Loans

$120.16

Total

$1891.32

 

My expenses were way too high last month.  I spent $440 on a new clutch for my car which made my transportation expense much higher than normal.  My vacation in Cancun made my entertainment expense abnormally high.  The bad thing about that is I spent almost $100 on entertainment at home.

Those expenses should return to normal this month.  My other expenses should remain in the same ballpark.  I would really like to get my food expense back under $100.  I only went $10 over last month which isn’t bad considering I was on vacation for five days but I would just like to show myself that I have the self-discipline to get my food expense back under budget.  I’m hoping for total expenses of less than $1000 this month.

February Blogging Wage: $29.38 p/h

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I decided to keep track of my hours spent blogging last month so I could determine my hourly wage for blogging. The resulting figure is very misleading.  I spent 21 hours on blogging in February.  That figure includes actual time writing posts and working on the blog.  It doesn’t include time spent reading other blogs or corresponding with other bloggers.  If that time was included my hours would easily double.  The total hours is also lower than normal due to February being a short month and my spending little time on the blog while on vacation.

My blogs made $617.40 last month.  That is by far my best month and won’t likely be repeated.  My income being abnormally high and my hours being lower than normal result in an hourly wage that is much higher than normal.  I’d guess my usual blogging wage is closer to minimum wage but last month was the first month I kept track of my time spent so I can’t be sure.

If I could make that wage every month I wouldn’t look for a job I’d just spend more time blogging.  That wouldn’t really work since some of the income realized this month covered several months of sales.  Also doubling my hours blogging wouldn’t result in a doubling of income.  The return for hours spent blogging would rapidly decline as my hours increased.  It is nice to make that much for the month though and it makes a goal of earning a living online seem possible.