DD’s Monthly Expense Checkup – August 2008

You loyal readers out there will recall that I’m charting my family’s monthly expenses in an effort to see where our money is really being spent. Below are the results from August:

  • $830.00 – Daycare
  • $830.00 – Mortgage
  • $540.99 – Medical Bills
  • $518.28 – Groceries
  • $330 – Van Loan
  • $208.12 – Gas
  • $203.31 – Misc Household Items
  • $145.00 – Student Loan
  • $140.75 – Electricity
  • $115.75 – Phone & Internet
  • $95.81 – Painting supplies
  • $89.88 – Contacts
  • $42.39 – Dog Food
  • $25.77 – Dining Out
  • $20.00 – Donations
  • $17.00 – County Fair
  • $12.00 – Tennis
  • $5.29 – Movies & Videos (Netflix)

For a grand total of $4170.34

YIKES!!!

Last months total was $3875.84, so we’re headed in the wrong direction. Lets see what caused this:

  1. $500+ in Medical Bills – This is a little misleading. Most of these bills have been sitting around quite a while while I waited to get final billing statements/insurance adjustments.
  2. $500+ Groceries – This one surprised me. But it really shouldn’t have. We went wild and tried some new recipes this month and they contained some exotic ingredients that I normally would never buy.
  3. $200+ Misc Household Items – This is about double of what it should be, but I guess we did stock up on some stuff and got a couple of things that we normally wouldn’t (TV converter box, propane refill).
  4. $95 Painting Supplies – When I lost my job, I stupidly started prepping part of my house to be repainted, thinking that I’d get it done with all my free-time. After killing myself scrapping for a couple of weeks, I decided I didn’t have the right tools for the job. Now I got the tools, but I might not get done before winter.
  5. $90 Contacts – I switched to a new eye-care center 6 months ago, and have always felt I’m paying too much for contacts. I’m going to try 1-800-Contacts for my next shipment.

But it wasn’t a total failure. There were some improvements:

  1. Dinning out – This is a weakness of ours, but we’re really trying to cut this back.
  2. Gas – I thought this would be much lower since we only went out of town twice and gas prices are a little lower. But then I noticed that two of our fill-ups were on the 1st and the 30th, so this number was hurt by bad timing.
  3. Daycare – Since the daycare billing cycle is one month behind, the lower number in this category was really just because of one less week in July compared to June. Next months bill will reflect the cutting back of hours.

I really hope by paying cash for some stuff makes a difference, because we clearly need to trim things more than we have been. And I can no longer be shocked by a family spending 8K a month when we are halfway there ourselves.

Until next time,

-DD

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