Expense/Income Tracking

December’s SWR was 37.67 compared to 38.87% in November. That was a slight improvement. 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 31.85 months of living expenses saved which is a slight improvement compared to 30.86 months of living expenses saved in November. I calculate my months of living expenses saved by dividing the average of my trailing twelve months of expenses by my total money saved.

Considering I didn’t make much money in December any improvement is good. I think I’m going to stop calculating these numbers for the next few months while I’m working full-time and do a post on the percentage of my income saved/paid towards student loans instead. Would you rather see that post? or both? or neither?

Here is a breakdown of my income for December.

My income for November wasn’t that great. Since my expenses for the month were also very low I still basically broke even for the month so I can’t complain.

My cashback income was a bright spot since I made over $50.  I guess that was from people doing their Christmas shopping. 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.

January should  be a better month for income. My full-time tax job starts this month which will likely provide the bulk of my income for the year. I’m not sure how the paydays fall so I might get only one paycheck this month. Even if I only get one paycheck it will be enough to make this month’s income larger than in December.

Here is a breakdown of my expenses for December.

My December expenses were very low. I managed to make my stretch goal of keeping my expenses to $1000 a month. Not having any travel expense in December helped a lot in keeping my expenses down. Not having a car anymore helped keep any unexpected expenses from popping up. The cheap gas prices helped too. I only spent $48.55 to fill up my GF’s car with gas twice and get an oil change. It is unlikely I’ll be able to keep my expenses as low this month. I’m returning to work which usually results in me spending more money on food. My health insurance will also be almost $30 a month more this year. Although I expect my expenses to go up this month I think I have a good shot of keeping my expenses under $1000. I can’t complain about that.

Since I was so lazy last month I didn’t get around to calculating October’s SWR. It probably wasn’t much different from September’s.  Since I’m not currently  adding anything to savings there isn’t much change in my SWR.

My SWR for November was 38.87%. That is a slight improvement from 39.48% in September. The improvement was due to value of my stocks increasing.  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 30.86 months of living expenses saved which is a slight increase from 30.38 months saved in September. 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 income for November.

My income for November was pretty bad.  Almost all of my income came from my job, I barely made any money from alternative sources of income.  I didn’t do much to earn extra income the first couple of the weeks of November since I was in Cancun and Vegas. I did work a week during the later part of the month, but that check wasn’t paid until this month.

My online income was actually negative.  I didn’t make any money during the month and had to pay my annual hosting bill. I knew a month like this would come eventually. For the year, my online income is still pretty good for the amount of time I have put into it.

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.

December  will be a better month for income. It shouldn’t be too hard to beat November’s tiny total. I keep thinking I must be missing some income, but I really don’t think I did. Since I have a lot of savings and my expenses for the month were fairly small as well I can easily afford to have a low-income month like this.  I’d still like to make more money though.