My income isn't sufficient for my expenses. This is really the story of everyone who struggles on /r/personalfinance, but my situation seems to lend itself to little possibilities at growth. I was hoping the good people of Reddit could help me see something I don't. Here's what's going on right now:
I'm a sole breadwinner in a couple, no kids, living in Los Angeles. I make $27.50 per hour, which roughly translates to $57,200 annually. I work a good amount of overtime and this is easily $60k after that. My wife has had a lot of trouble getting work due to being long-term unemployed.
Here are my expenses:
$1200 / mo. for Rent
$360 / mo. car payment
$430 / mo. me and wife health insurance
$300 / mo. essential gas expense
$205 / mo. car insurance
$14 / mo. renter insurance
$400 / mo. groceries
$70 / mo. electric
$147 / mo. dental bill
$35 / mo. wife and me dental / vision ins.
$50 / mo. internet
This adds up to $3221 per month, which is barely below my take home pay. This also doesn't include expenses paid out such as car registration, court costs from a lawsuit I'm facing, etc.
I have a 28 mile commute to work in Los Angeles so I can't get rid of my car, and I'm currently underwater by $2000 on the loan (the car is worth maybe $4.5K private party per KBB but I still owe just over $6k). Selling it would require doing close to $2k in repairs as well. I also am on-call with my employer and I work IT so I must have an internet connection to remotely connect to my employer when needed. The cell reception at our apartment is terrible too so this is how our Wi-Fi calling works.
I'm familiar with the 50/20/30 rule, but there doesn't seem to be any way for me to even get close to this metric. Whatever little money we don't pay in bare essentials goes into filling our meager emergency fund (seeing as we recently had an emergency), so the current split is more like 90/9/1. I'm not even sure what we spend on "us" as we haven't gone out to eat since going vegan and don't buy any entertainment anymore. Our essential expenses should be no more than $1750 per month according to the rule above.
We can drop our health insurance. I have insurance through my employer but it's cheaper to insure my wife through the exchange (without a subsidy, at that). If we do this we'd bring our monthly expenses to $2756 per month, or $1006 more than optimal. If we somehow drop our car payment, we can reduce our expenses by $360, but since I still need a vehicle of some kind, I'm still going to have to pay for insurance and gas. I can lower it if I can somehow get a cheaper car, but what would you do with an underwater car and no fast way to pay the difference?
My teeth are in terrible shape since I never took care of them. This is obviously my fault, but I've never taken care of my teeth since my teens as I was never taught to do this as a child. Regardless of how I want it, we have recently gotten into $1700 in debt to fix my teeth. I had another surgical extraction followed by a full deep cleaning, and that's not all we're going to need to do. How can I get ongoing dental care for better costs, since even with insurance this is expensive?
We can reduce our grocery expenses, and have done so, as $400 is the "upper bound" on what we spend in food. Generally we get it down to around $300 to $325 for two people, but I don't know how to get it much lower than that. What can we do to reduce the amount we spend on food?
Finally, our rent is way too high, but I have an IT job in Los Angeles, and due to my complete lack of a degree (like... literally nothing) and with only a year and a half of experience (earned here), I have to stay with my specific employer in this specific place. I cannot duplicate this job in any other location because this was a special, particularly sweet deal that can't come by anywhere else. We had a lower rent when we lived in a trailer behind someone's house, but my wife couldn't take it and the only apartments that are cheaper than the one we have has cockroaches and bedbugs and my wife can't stand that. Where would you live in this situation?
My job is tough, I'm only paid for the hours I work in the office, but I am given way, way more tasks than I can possibly do in a day, so I end up spending more time remotely and on weekends without pay. I know I'm not supposed to, but it's either this or find another warehouse job for substandard pay. I want to make a damn good impression and use this as a footstool to get myself to a higher pay scale. Because of these extra hours, and the time I spend on everything I can't pay to maintain, I'm finding it extremely difficult to have a side hustle. If you're short on time, how else would you make money?
What can I do to reduce my expenses or increase my income, Reddit?
Submitted July 24, 2017 at 04:01PM by ZekeDragon http://ift.tt/2vD2jOK
