Expense/Income Tracking

I’m way behind getting this up due to last week’s vacation and general laziness the two weeks before the vacation. I plan to write a post a day this week to get caught up.

My SWR for September was  39.48%. That is down from 37.25% the month before. The decrease was due to the declining stock market in September. Since I’m writing this so long after the fact I already know that the stocks recovered in October.  When I don’t add any money to my savings the only changes to my SWR and months of living expenses saved are from my investment performance and the average of my trailing twelve month’s of expenses going up or down.

My goal is to get the SWR down to 4% so the lower my SWR is the better. That goal is probably many years from being met. The 4% SWR translates into having 25x your annual expenses in savings or 300 months of expenses in savings. Once I reach that point I will consider myself financially independent.

I have 30.38 months of living expenses saved which is a slight decrease from 32.21 months saved in August.  I calculate my months of living expenses saved by dividing the average of my trailing twelve months of expenses by my total money saved.

There won’t be any big changes to these numbers until I start working full-time again in January and can contribute more to my savings.  I’m hoping in the meantime they will at least stay about the same.

Here is a breakdown of my expenses for September.

My September expenses were high, but that is mainly because I had a dental procedure that was about a $600 expense. If you take that away my expenses were fairly close to my target of $1000.

My food expenses were way too high.  That was mainly due to having expensive meals during my hiking trip on the Katy Trail. I should have done better there, but when you’re walking there aren’t a lot of restaurant options. I did eat out way too much the first half of the month which made my weight loss harder than it needed to be.

Travel is the other expense that I don’t always have.  A big part of that was $114 I spent on a hotel during my hike.  That was more than I wanted to spend, but where I got off the trail there wasn’t any camping and only a couple of hotels were within reasonable walking distance.  It didn’t occur to me until later that I could have taken a taxi to a cheaper hotel and still come out ahead. Oh well, I will know better next time.  I also prepaid some of the expense for our trip to Cancun next month.  This vacation is not going to be as cheap as I originally thought.  It will still be a great deal though.

Entertainment expenses were my only low-cost category. This was because I had purchased a movie gift card the month before and we only went to the movies once.  My entertainment for the month was mainly watching lots of football.

This month I will have dental expenses and travel expenses again so it will not be a low-cost month.  I should at least be able to lower my food expense.  Although it will be a higher expense month I’m okay with it.  It isn’t worth letting my dental health suffer just to save money.

My SWR for August was 37.25%.  While writing this post I noticed that last month I stated my SWR rate was 37.58% in the post and 35.22% in the title. I’m not sure which one of those is correct.  Depending on which is correct my SWR either slightly improved or got a little worse. I didn’t add to my savings in August, but the stock market did pretty well so I think the SWR probably improved slightly.

My goal is to get the SWR down to 4% so the lower my SWR is the better. That goal is probably many years from being met. The 4% SWR translates into having 25x your annual expenses in savings or 300 months of expenses in savings. Once I reach that point I will consider myself financially independent.

I have 32.21 months of living expenses saved which is a slight improvement from 31.92 months saved in July. This amount went up due to the stock market rebound in August. I didn’t add to my savings in August.  I calculate my months of living expenses saved by dividing the average of my trailing twelve months of expenses by my total money saved. When I don’t add any money to my savings the only changes to my SWR and months of living expenses saved are from my investment performance and the average of my trailing twelve month’s of expenses going up or down.

Here is a breakdown of my income for August.

My income was pretty good in August.  Although I only worked the first couple of days in August I received a couple of paychecks so I still had decent income from the job.

I kept better track of my Amazon FBA income during August so I can give an exact figure there.  My main motivation for doing Amazon FBA was to earn a Southwest Companion pass through using the Rapid Rewards shopping portal.  I should have my companion pass at the end of the month so I’ll probably cut back on Amazon FBA.  I wasn’t doing a big volume anyway so cutting back won’t make much difference.

I received some bonus income from the Motif  referral bonus and the Betterment referral bonus.  If you want to sign up through one of my referral links they are in the sidebar. If you want more information on either of the bonuses feel free to email me or leave a comment. I’m going to try to make more money from these referral bonuses.  I like them because they make me money and make money for my readers as well.

My cashback income stayed about the same. 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.

This month is the last month of my medical study.  I’ll be getting a larger check this month than last which should help my overall income for the month.  Without any job income I’ll probably make less in September.  I do plan to ramp up selling stuff on Craigslist and Ebay so that might offset some of the loss of job income.

Here is a breakdown of my expenses for August.

My August expenses almost got down to my target level of $1000.  I had a dental appointment which cost $165 which caused part of the overage. My entertainment expense was the only category that was way too high.  I spent $40 on a $50 movie gift card which will be used mainly this month and I put some more money into fixing my bike which resulted in the high entertainment expense.  All of my other expense categories were okay.  This month I am having some oral surgery so my expenses will be way up. I will probably also have some travel expense. Everything else should remain about the same.