Expense/Income Tracking

Here is a breakdown of my expenses for October. I thought I had already posted these, but since the post is nowhere to be found on my blog I guess I didn’t or it just disappeared somehow.

My October expenses were high due to two big expenses on health and travel.  The health expense was big due to the bone graft surgery I had to prepare for getting dental implants next year. The travel expense was high due to paying for my hotel room for November’s vacation and my last-minute passport experience.

I’m okay with the health expenses since getting my implants is important to my future dental health.  Other than the extra $70 I had to pay to get my passport expedited I’m okay with the travel expenses as well.  The Cancun vacation ended up costing a little more than I planned, but it was still a decent value.  As a once a year expense it is okay to splurge a little.

Here is a breakdown of my income for October.

My income was pretty good in October considering I only worked a couple of weeks.

My online income was almost exactly the same as last month. I keep expecting it to go down, but so far it has been holding steady.

The $600 I won from my Healthy Wage bet helped boost my alternative income quite a bit.  It was nice to make over $1200 in income from sources other than my job.

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.

November will probably not be as good of a month for income.  I didn’t do much to earn extra income the first couple of the weeks of this month since I was in Cancun and Vegas. I will be starting another temp job next week so the month should still be decent.

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.