Expense/Income Tracking

Here is a breakdown of my expenses for February.

My February expenses were fairly low. I managed to make my stretch goal of keeping my expenses under $1000 a month for the third month in a row.  The streak will end when I have to pay for my dental implants. I’m hoping I can keep the streak going until them.

My food expenses were low since I managed to keep my fast food expenses under $50.  There are also some dinners out with my GF that I put in the entertainment category. Those were kept fairly cheap with coupons and/or gift cards. I did pretty well in that category considering Valentine’s Day and my GF’s birthday were in February.

My health expenses were a little higher due to getting sick and needing some prescriptions. The total would have been much lower if I hadn’t paid $53 at CVS for a drug I could have gotten for $4 at Walmart. I won’t be filling any more prescriptions at CVS. I can’t complain about the overall cost of the sickness. My GF being a nurse managed to get me a couple prescriptions from her nurse practitioner and doctor without having an official doctor visit. I will have to pay some lab fees this month, but they won’t be too much.

March should be another low-cost month. We do have a vacation to Las Vegas coming up at the end of the month. The airfare was free and the room is free other than the resort fee so the vacation shouldn’t cost too much.

Here is a breakdown of my income for February.

February was a decent month for income, but not as good as I hoped. Missing three days of work due to being sick resulted in my job income being a good deal less than I planned. Online income went down by quite a bit. This wasn’t a surprise since it was unusually high the month before.  I didn’t manage to make any money from bonuses or Amazon FBA. I actually lost a little on FBA which I will take off this month’s total.  My interest income went up a little since I loaned my GF $10,000 to buy a car. I might write more about that later.

The job income should go up this month and hopefully I will be able to make a little more money from my alternative income streams. I’m hoping to not work at a job the rest of this year once I finish my tax job so I need to bump up this income.

If you haven’t joined Mr. Rebates yet you can get a $5 bonus for signing up through my referral link and I’ll make a little money for referring you as well.

My FIRE (financial independence retire early) numbers improved a bit in January.  This isn’t too surprising since I started my seasonal tax job in January which allows me to put more money into savings. My safe withdrawal rate improved to 35.89% from 37.67% in December. My goal is to get the SWR down to 4% so the lower my SWR is the better.The 4% SWR translates into having 25x your annual expenses in savings or 300 months of expenses in savings.

I have 33.43 months of expenses saved. This is probably the better number to look at when calculating my progress towards financial independence. A SWR of 35.89% might not immediately seem like it is a long way from getting to a 4% SWR, but when I see have 33.43 months of expenses saved and I need 300 it is obvious I have got a lot more savings to do. I hope to also bring down my average monthly expenses which will help me reach the 300 goal faster. Even though the goal of 300 months of expenses is far away it is nice to know that if I suddenly stopped earning money at all I would have almost three years before I ran out of money.

February should be a low expense month and I plan to put most of my paychecks into savings. As long as the stock market isn’t absolutely terrible I should make some nice progress towards FIRE this month.

Here is a breakdown of my income for January.

January was a pretty good month for income. Starting my seasonal tax job always results in a nice bump in income. I only had one payday in January so February should be even better.  My online income was surprisingly high. That was a result of hitting the minimum for payout on both Adsense and an affiliate account and also a slight increase in ad revenue. In January I finally kept complete records of my Amazon FBA sales and expenses so I am able to provide an accurate income number for the month. This was my best FBA month, but it still didn’t add up to much. For now, I will continue to dabble with FBA.  The return I get from the time I put into it is less than what I would get from my job. I mostly enjoy doing it though so I’ll continue with it whenever I find good deals. I just won’t put any special effort into finding the deals. I also made $105 in bonuses and I should make more money from referral and bank bonuses this month.

This will be the last month I have any dividend income to report for a while. I sold my last dividend paying stocks at the beginning of the month.  That money is now invested in an index fund in my IRA. Unless, I buy more dividend stocks -which I don’t plan to do- I won’t have any more dividend income to report.

My cashback income went down a little since the Christmas rush ended. Considering it is completely passive income at this point, whatever I make from it is good. If you haven’t joined Mr. Rebates yet you can get a $5 bonus for signing up through my referral link and I’ll make a little money for referring you as well.

February should be at least a little bit better. My job income will definitely be up. My other sources of income will likely be down a little.  I’m sure it will be a good income month.

Here is a breakdown of my expenses for January.

My January expenses were nice and low. I managed to make my stretch goal of keeping my expenses under $1000 a month for the second month in a row. Not having a car does help keep my monthly expenses down. Entertainment expenses were also low since we were able to use gift cards we received for Christmas to go to the movies a couple of times and we didn’t do much else. The travel expenses are for airfare for two different trips. My GF and I are flying round trip KC to Vegas in March. In April we will both fly from KC to Buffalo and she will return to KC while I will take a bus to the Appalachian Trail.  Paying $39.20 for three round trip flights and a one-way flight is a pretty good deal. The flights did put a big dent in my Southwest point balance. I’ll need to build them back up if we are going to have free flights for later this year.  I intend to write a post about these trips in the next few weeks.

My health insurance is about $30 higher this year, other than that my expenses are about the same as last month. February should also be a low expense month. Until I get my dental implants or buy a car every month should be a low expense month. It looks like this will be a low expense year and I’m happy about that.