Expense Analysis - January 2008
Filed under: Expenses, Tracking Spreadsheet
After the turmoil of our daughter’s birthday and the Christmas season, January promised relief from the stress of the hustle-and-bustle. The pleasant surprise that January also brought is that we had our first “black” month in nearly a year. Even with the surprise expenses of needing a new microwave and getting socked with a $300+ gas & electric bill, I earned $63 more in salary than we spent in the month of January.
For these calculations, I am ignoring any income from my business since it’s not a guaranteed source quite yet. In order for me to be comfortable with our situation, we have to spend less than I know I will earn from month to month. It’s not a requirement that I would place on everyone; it’s just something I chose to do as another form of fiscal insurance.
What’s been very beneficial this past month was keeping my spreadsheet in mind. We’ve been meticulously tracking our spending through 2 months now and knowing that my wife sees every dollar I spend makes me always think twice before buying anything. Before, I held the mindset of, “I’m an adult. I earn my own money. I should be able to buy whatever I please.” Now, I’m holding myself accountable for every penny that leaves my pocket.
Since I now have a baseline for my data, I will spare the individual breakdown and focus on how spending changed from December to January:
(Click to enlarge)
Outside of the expenses that don’t come every month (such as auto insurance), there were a few notable differences:
- Business Expense was a new category this month with the launching of my home-based consulting company.
- Since I expect to open a business checking account this month, I doubt I will include this category in the future. (Unless, heaven forbid, I have to put even more money into that account to keep things going.)
- Church, which tallies all of our charitable donations to the church, saw a notable decrease.
- This was part due to December having 5 Sundays and part because we skipped giving for one week because our account was dry for that week. Now that the danger has past, we will play catch-up in the coming weeks to cover that shortfall.
- The Gifts Given category saw a decrease for obvious reasons.
- Our Household category increased because of the new microwave.
- What’s interesting to note is that, though the microwave cost over $200, the category gained only $133. This shows we would have seen a marked decrease in that category if not for the microwave.
- Finally, our Utilities showed a 30% increase due to the very cold December we weathered.
- Even though the bill covers the month of December, for our spreadsheet, we use the Due Date for the spreadsheet tracking. It was an arbitrary decision we made to ease tracking and to line up with the fact that the bill had to be paid with January’s money.
It is so amazing that we were able to show a net gain even with the dramatic unexpected expenses. It just goes to show that the effort we have made into cutting our spending is paying off. I can’t wait to see how February will look as we continue this trend. Well, that is, as long as the washing machine holds out.
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