Thursday, July 17, 2014

Month in Review- June

Sorry for the Month in Review Delay :) More to come on our vacation tomorrow and next week!

Month Four was a whirlwind. I was looking back at my Month In Review- May and it made me smile! All the fun activities we did and all the time we spent with friends and family. June seemed to have buzzed by without a second thought. Financially, I think Nick and I are starting to get the hang of our discretionary funding, or at least how to track it, we still need to learn how to spend less.

Unexpected Costs: 

Car had to go in for repairs. This ate into our "extra" income, but we were fortunate to have the wiggle room to cover repairs when needed. Otherwise, it was a pretty straight forward month! By adding the Alcohol and Family/Friend lines to our budget, unexpected costs didn't occur, they were budgeted for :)

Unexpected Income: $ 1, 928
We signed a new lease on our apartment last month, and so this month we didn't need to pay rent, meaning it all went toward student loans! This was a very exciting and took a huge dent out of the 12.5% loan we are trying to tackle!

We also sold our old AC on Craigslist and did our weekend modeling gig.

June Splurges:
Nothing really extra this month. We did buy pizza twice, which has been uncommon for us lately, so I guess it has kinda become a treat :)

Funniest Moment: 
This is a bit of a May/June funny moment, but it all began with me trying to stay in budget. We were having a lot of people in and out of the house, so I tried to be frugal when picking up a case of beer and bought Miller High Life. Now I understand that some people love Miller High Life, but I am just not one of those people. We get home, I have one beer and I was done. I was not interested in drinking 23 more of those, that was for sure!!

So as the saying goes, "turn lemons into lemonade," I just decided to ADD lemonade. I knew it wasn't going to HURT the beer : ) The next thing I know we were having Summer Shandy's with our homemade Cran-Lemonade :) Carbonated Lemonade with Miller High Life became my new favorite beer on a hot day. I do believe we ended up buying at least 2 more 6-packs of Miller!!

Lessons Learned
I finally figured out why we don't have money for groceries at the end of the month... COSTCO. I never budget for Costco but typically take it out of the grocery line! We are saving money from buying in bulk at Costco, but on a week to week basis we still have to buy staples at the grocery store.

I have been paying attention to how much we were spending at the grocery store, roughly $75 a week. When making our monthly budget, I was simply taking $75 and multiplying it by how many weeks in the month. By the last two weeks of the month, for the past 3 months, we are down to pinching pennies and trying to use everything in the freezer and cupboards because we don't have money in the grocery line.

I finally asked myself WHY does this keep happening. When I looked through all three months I realized that we may spend $75 weekly, but that is not possible without a $100 Costco trip for staples. For July, I have adjusted the budget to read $100 for Costco and the $75/week in Groceries. We had to move other money around to make this work, but now we should actually be able to stay in budget or hopefully duck in a little below budget!

Total Payment to Debt: $1,868.08, on top of our minimum payments for June

TOTALLY AWESOME MONTH :) I think it is our best yet! Yay to no RENT :)  

Current Debt: $170,382.01

We started with a total of 35 Student Loans.
We are currently at 34 Student Loans and we need to pay $2,535.20 more in order to reach #33 :)

Student loan #34 has our highest interest rate at 12.5% ! We are ready to get rid of this one as soon as possible!

1 comment:

  1. I love the idea of making summer shandys out of Miller, great idea!! Can't wait to be frugal with you in Colorado!

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