September Expenses – $1743.67

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Here is a breakdown of my expenses for September.

Household $408.45
Entertainment $19.68
Transportation $90.19
Food $181.83
Student Loan $106.00
Travel $258.40
Phone $26.81
Health $652.31
Total $1743.67

 

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.

Weight Loss Goal Achieved!

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CAM00421 It wasn’t easy, but I have finally achieved my weight loss goal. As most of you probably already know I bet $3000 back in April that I could lose 30 pounds in six months. My weight loss started off fast and then plateaued for most of the summer. This last month I kicked the weight loss into high gear again since I was in serious danger of losing $3000. The last few pounds to lose were very stubborn. I was stuck with about five pounds to lose for two weeks. This week I watched my diet very carefully and exercised and was finally rewarded with meeting my weight loss goal. I would have preferred to have lost more than my goal, but just hitting the goal is still a big accomplishment. I’m celebrating meeting my goal by eating some foods I’ve been denying myself this weekend. After that I’m going to get back to losing weight. My new goal will be to get to 170 pounds which is considered a healthy weight for my height. I’m hoping I can hit that goal early next year. The all-inclusive vacation next month and all the holiday food might make that goal difficult, but I think I can do it.

I just sent the email to HealthyWage.com to claim my winnings. I don’t think they have anyone working the weekends, but I’m hoping it won’t take too long to process the winnings. I’ll let you know how the process of collecting my winnings goes and do a review of my experience with Healthy Wage once my bet has been paid.

August Safe Withdrawal Rate – 37.25%

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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.

Doing Vegas on the Cheap

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Earlier this year, I took an almost free Vegas vacation by using credit card bonuses. I still think that is the easiest way to get a cheap or free Vegas vacation, but I recently discovered a couple of new ways to reduce the cost of a Vegas Vacation. A post on the Mr. Money Mustache forum informed me of the MyVegas Rewards and Social Rewards programs that can be used to earn things such as free rooms, free buffets, free show tickets, and more.

MyVegas Rewards is a program set up by MLife which is the rewards program for MGM resorts. The basic idea of MyVegas rewards is that you can earn real comps by playing slots and table games on the MyVegas Facebook page. Playing the games rewards you with loyalty points which can be redeemed for free rooms, free meals, free show tickets and other rewards. After about a month of playing I have about 36,000 loyalty points which I could use for three nights at Circus Circus, two nights at Excalibur, or one night at New York New York or Monte Carlo.

I would suggest you join a group such as MyVegas Friends which will help you earn points faster and has guides on how to optimize your play. You might want to consider setting up a separate Facebook account for playing the game since all of the postings from the game can clutter up your news feed. Setting up a second account for games is a violation of Facebook rules so you will have to decide whether it is worth the risk that Facebook might possibly shut down the new account. Another thing to consider is that you still have to pay resort fees when you redeem for a free night. Excalibur charges about $20 a night in resort fees. Last time I was in Vegas I stayed in a non-casino hotel and paid about $35 a night so a free room is only saving me about $15 a night. I do enjoy playing the MyVegas games though so I think the rewards are a pretty good deal.

Social Rewards is a much simpler program. It is affiliated with TotalRewards which is the rewards program for Caesars Entertainment. Between these two programs you have most of the casinos on the strip covered. You get rewards for this program by sharing information about Caesars resorts and casinos on your social media accounts. You are limited to three shares a day so it is quick and easy to do this program each day. I’ve earned a little over $20 in free rewards since starting to use this program about a month ago.

Another thing to consider that I haven’t tried is legal online gaming while you are in Las Vegas. Some of the Las Vegas casinos now also have legal online casinos.   The interesting thing about these casinos is that some offer a bonus for signing up online and making a deposit. The catch here is that you have to be located in New Jersey or Nevada when playing online. I think you would be able to play online while visiting New Jersey or Nevada, but I’m not sure. This is something you might want to explore for yourself.

Although these programs aren’t as great as I first thought they are still a pretty good deal in my opinion. Since IS enjoy playing MyVegas slots and Social Rewards doesn’t take much time I’ll keep using these programs. Rewards from these programs should make my next Vegas vacation very inexpensive.

Weight Loss Bet – 5 Month Update

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Before I get to the weight loss update I want to give an update about the blog’s appearance. When the latest edition of WordPress came out I updated and noticed that all of the comments on the blog were no longer visible. I couldn’t figure out how to make them visible again. I figured it had something to do with my Thesis theme so I attempted to update to the latest version of Thesis. I was able to upload it, but kept getting an error message when trying to access the manage skins tab. This meant that my site was a blank page so that wouldn’t work. After several hours of trying to get my comments restored and make the them work I gave up and decided to just switch themes. I’m now using the free 2014 theme that comes standard on WordPress. Although it doesn’t look great it looks good enough and I don’t want to spend any more time on the blog’s appearance. The site should at least function correctly now. Let me know if you have any problems with the site and I’d also like to get feedback on the new appearance.

I now have less than one month left on my weight loss bet. The bet will pay me $3600 if I manage to lose the weight ($3000 of the amount is my own money being returned to me) and if I don’t manage to lose the weight I’ll be out $3000. The idea behind the bet is that the prospect of losing $3000 will motivate me to lose the weight.

After backsliding a little earlier in the month I now have less than ten pounds to lose. I’d prefer to have already lost the weight rather than taking to the last-minute to lose the weight, but I’m still confident that I will lose the weight. I’ve been experimenting with a low carb diet the last three days and I’ve lost over a pound a day on the diet. If I’m able to maintain that rate of weight loss I’ll easily lose the weight in time to win the bet. There is a two-week weigh-in period that starts on September 23. That day also happens to be my birthday. It would be pretty sweet if I could meet my weight-loss goal on that day. I’m making that my goal now. I’ll update you when I have met the goal.