DD’s Monthly Expenses – December 2008

I for one am glad the holidays are over.    I am having a very hard time getting back into the swing of things.   I think that is why it took me a week to tally up December’s expenses.  That, and I’m pretty sure we screwed up BIG TIME last month so I was in no rush to see the damage.

Here are the results:

  • $830.00 – Mortgage
  • $749.70 – Household Misc/Gifts
  • $looking-for-groceries639.00 – Daycare
  • $494.34 – Groceries
  • $207.88 – Electricity
  • $150.00 – Student Loan
  • $125.00 – Investing
  • $116.67 – Dog (food, vet, toy)
  • $115.75 – Phone & Internet
  • $90.70 – Vehicle  (non fuel)
  • $60.00 – Donations
  • $60.00 – Tennis
  • $53.78 – Dinning Out
  • $47.95 – Gas
  • $40.00 – Medical Bills
  • $39.44 – Park & Rec Classes
  • $29.95 – Magazine Subscription
  • $27.36 – B-Day party
  • $15.00 – Haircut
  • $11.00 – Movies

For a total of $3903.52…Ouch!

The sad thing is that I’m not sure that this is the true total.  I couldn’t find some of the receipts for gifts we bought.  I guessed at what we were missing so it’s close but not as exact as other months have been.

Biggest Budget Busters:

  1. $749.70 – Household Misc/Gifts –  Most of this was gifts.  Like my last post mentioned we spent close to $600 this year on presents.  At the time it didn’t feel so bad, but now that it’s January, I wish this was closer to $500.
  2. $494.34 – Groceries – So much for the envelope system keeping us on track.  This was a big surprise to me because on New Years Eve my wife went to the store and I gave her the $8 we had left in the envelope to shop with (just a few items so it was enough).  We even congratulated ourselves on being under budget.  I found the problem when checking the receipts (groceries purchased at Target using a credit card).
  3. $125.00 Investing –  Thanks to our horrible economy, my favorite stock dipped to a level it hasn’t been in many years.  So I grabbed 20 shares.  And while it has already gone up 15 %, I’m putting this here because I have no business playing the market right now.

Biggest Budget Breakthroughs:

  1. $53.78 – Dinning Out – I put $75 in this envelope and it’s nice to see that we still have some left.  I could’ve sworn that we’d go out more than we did.  Oh well…
  2. $27.36 – B-Day party – My daughter turned 4 last month and we threw her a fun little party. This amount represents the materials needed for the games and trinkets.  I’m putting it here because this past weekend we went to an 8 year old girl’s party and the parents spent $120 to go to a gymnastics place where the kids could jump around for an hour.  It was fun, but my daughter still talks about the games we played at her party and I think the gymnastics party is forgotten about already.
  3. $11.00 – Movies – I know this is higher than it normally is, but thanks to me earning some passes my wife & I were able to see Benjamin Button with a large popcorn & drink for $11. Before children we went to a ton of movies, it was one of our favorite things to do.  Even though we both thought it was a sad movie, we had a bunch of fun getting out of the house.

So there we have it.  Overall I’d say we took a couple steps back.  We had a few miscues with the envelope system, but I think we’ll be able to fix those as time goes on.  We’ll have to because starting this month we added what looks like will be our 2nd biggest monthly expense.

But I’ll write about that another time.

Until next time,

-DD

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