Expense/Income Tracking

Here is a breakdown of my expenses for April.

My April expenses were higher than I like.  I spent $380 on repairs for my car or I still would have made it under the $1000 level for the month though.  My food bill was a lot higher than normal due to eating out while I was traveling for my hike.  My actual travel expenses were low at $28 since I was able to get most of my expenses reimbursed by my Capital One Venture card, my Southwest Visa card and my Barclaycard Arrival™ World MasterCard® – Earn 2x on All Purchases. That isn’t bad for a 12 day trip with 2 hotel stays, 1 hostel stay, a commuter train ride, two taxis, an airport shuttle, and a plane ticket. This was also the first month that I had to start paying my student loan which keeps my fixed expenses higher than they were.

I think May should be a lower expense month.  The transportation expense will go back to normal and everything else will remain about the same as in April. The only exception to that would be the entertainment expense which will go up in May since it was artificially low in April due to using some gift cards and being gone on my trip for half of the month.

I think I could have a good shot at getting my yearly average monthly expense below $1000.  I do plan on having some dental work done though which will likely ruin my chance at having the lower expenses.  The dental work has been put off for a while though since I couldn’t afford it the past few years. It is more important to get my teeth healthy now than to keep my expenses below the $1000 level. Even with the dental expenses I think I will have respectably low expenses for the year.

In March I made $2959.78 and saved $2300 for a savings rate of 77.72%.  That savings rate is artificially high due to my having some extra money in my checking account at the end of February that was added to my savings in March.  Plus I took advantage of two different bonus offers from Motif Investing and Kapitall that added $100 to my savings and will eventually add approximately $100 more.  If you would like to sign up for Motif to get the $100 bonus leave me a comment and I’ll send you an email with a referral link. You do have to invest $1000 and make at least one trade to get the bonus.  Also, I will get a $100 bonus for referring you.

My safe withdrawal rate decreased to 39.05% from 42.89% the month before.  This is the first time I have gotten my SWR into the 30s.  It would be nice if I could get my SWR into the 20s before the end of the year.  As the SWR gets lower it gets harder to make progress though.  I’ll need to keep my income up, my expenses low, and my savings rate high for the rest of the year to get the SWR down to the 20s.   My ultimate goal is to get my SWR down to 4%.  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 now have 30.72 months of expenses saved compared to 27.97 the month before. Since I am only working half of this month I won’t be able to add a lot to savings.  I do believe that I will still be able to get my SWR down a bit and my months of expenses saved up a bit.  May and June of last year were both big expense months.  I’m hoping that May and June of this year will be low expense months.  I base my average monthly expenses and my SWR off of my trailing twelve months of expenses.  So replacing two bad months in my trailing twelve months with two good months will help lower my average monthly expense quite a bit and it will also help improve my SWR even if I don’t manage to save much money in the next couple of months.

Here is a breakdown of my income for March.

March was a good month for income although not as good as February. That isn’t too surprising since I didn’t get a $1000 tax refund in March like I did in February.

My online income continues to chug along without much effort on my part.  I’m making about $450 a month this year which isn’t anywhere near as much as I used to make online, but it is still good money considering how little time I devote to it. If I remain unemployed once I come back from my hike I will see what I can do to increase my online income.

My passive income such as referral income from sites like Mr. Rebates and dividends is pretty small, but it adds up over the year.

My last day of work is the 16th of this month.  I will still get two full paychecks this month.  The job loss will not affect me until next month.  I’ll get my final paycheck of the tax season in May, although it will only be for a few days.  Since my bills are low and I’ve saved a lot of money during the tax season I don’t need to worry about money for a while. Once I return from my hike, which I’m guessing will be sometime in mid May, I will concentrate on getting my income back up to its current level.

Here is a breakdown of my expenses for March.

My March expenses were nice and low.  This is the second month in a row that not only did I make my normal goal of keeping my expenses under $1000 a month, I managed to keep my expenses under $900 for the month.  I’m not sure how long I can keep that up. Since I now have to pay $105 a month on my student loan I doubt I will have any more months under $900, but I think I can still manage some sub $1000 months.

This was another month where I didn’t have any unexpected expenses or any semi-annual expenses during the month.  I don’t have any semi-annual bills due this month and I’m hoping I won’t have any unexpected expenses.  If I manage to avoid those expenses it will be another low cost month.

We did take a three day vacation to Big Cedar Lodge near Branson at the end of the month.  This slightly inflated my transportation and entertainment expense, but it was actually a very cheap vacation.  Some of the expense probably could have been counted as a travel expense, but it was easier to just add the expense to the transportation and entertainment categories.

I am starting my Appalachian Trail hike later this month so I will likely have some travel expenses this month. I have quite a bit of free travel credit on my credit cards though so I should be able to erase those expenses.  I’m expecting my April expenses will be very similar to my March expenses except for the addition of the student loan bill.

I made $4138.30 in February and put $2000 in savings for a savings rate of 48.32%. That is just a bit higher than last month’s savings rate. I’m happy with that savings rate. I’m not putting money into savings quite as aggressively as I did last year. I’m planning to hike and do a bit of traveling this year after I finish my tax job. It doesn’t make any sense to put money into savings and then have to pull it right back out for travel expenses so I’m trying to save a little travel money outside of my savings.

My safe withdrawal rate decreased to 42.89%. That is still a long way from my goal of a 4% SWR, but at least I’m continuing to make progress. I should be able to get my SWR into the thirties this month. 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 now have 27.97 months of expenses saved compared to 25.91 months of expenses saved last month.

Keeping my expenses down helps my SWR a lot. I use my trailing 12 months of expenses when determining my SWR. Last March was a low expense month so even if I have another low expense March this year I won’t change my my trailing 12 month average much. May and June of last year were high expense months. I’m hoping to replace them with low expense months this year. If I am able to do that I should be able to reduce my SWR quite a bit even if I don’t manage to save much money those months. My current average monthly expenses based on the last 12 months is $1196.77. If I were able to get my average monthly expense down to $1000 then my SWR would only 35.84%. I think it is possible to get my average monthly expenses down to $1000 without impacting my quality of life and will keep working on getting my expenses to that level.