Backstory: My wife and I are both 24. I'm a PhD student, making $28k/year. After being unemployed for the first half of 2016, my wife is now employed as an elementary school teacher, making $34k/year. We got married right before the start of 2016. We live in a very low cost-of-living area, so we don't have huge rent expenses.
I'll admit it; I've always been a bit of a numbers geek. So, at the beginning of 2016 my wife and I decided to pay for everything via credit card, so we (I) can track our expenses. I break everything down into categories each month, and I calculate our average expenses per category. I know there are some programs out there that will do this automatically, but I wanted to do it myself because 1) I found that it really didn't take much time, and 2) I wanted to be able to separate expenses into categories manually (example: being able to separate buying $50 of groceries and $25 of school supplies in one run to the grocery store).
I won't go through category-by-category since I'm sure most people don't care, so I'll go through some of the highlights/lowlights:
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Before my wife started getting paid, we were about $1000/month in the hole. Luckily, I had about $30k saved up via working in high school/college, summer internships, etc., so this wasn't a huge issue. By the end of July, we were about $3k in the red for the year. It would've been much worse, but we got a $4k tax refund, which helped immensely.
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Despite being $3k in the hole at the end of July, we were back to breaking even for the year by the end of September. By the end of December, we were able to save $3500 for the year. It's less than I'd like to save, but it's better than nothing I guess!
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We spend way more on eating out than I realized! We spent about $3800 on eating out in 2016. A significant portion of this was due to the fact that we go do trivia with our friends every other week; once we both eat and have 1-2 drinks each, we're looking at a $40+ tab. Also, once my wife started her job we started spending more on fast food (she was too busy/drained to want to cook anything together). This is one area we're trying to improve on.
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Teachers really end up paying for their classrooms out of their own pocket! Before she started her job, we were spending about $40/month on school supplies (books, pens, paper, etc.). Since she started teaching, we're up to about $200-250/month in expenses between the two of us, mostly spent on supplies for her classroom.
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Adopting a dog is more expensive than you'd think. We adopted a dog from a local rescue in January. Between adoption fees, vet visits, toys, food, and supplies, we spent $850 in the first month alone. She also ended up getting sick a few months later, resulting in several hundred dollars in vet visits and medication. Now that she's all better, we still spend $75/month on average for food, toys, vet visits, heartworm prevention, and getting her nails trimmed.
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Not really expenses related, but moving our money to a high-yield savings account was definitely worth it! We're now getting about $16/month in interest, compared to the $0.48/month we were getting before.
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Also not expenses-related, but once my wife signed the paperwork for her job, I/we opened a Roth IRA! There's about $6500 in contributions in there right now, and the account balance is at $7150 or so.
Anyway, I just wanted to share that I found tracking our expenses manually to be very useful, and that it didn't take much time at all (2-3 minutes every night). I highly recommend it!
Submitted January 13, 2017 at 02:27PM by utb040713 http://ift.tt/2jFBG4y
