DD’s Monthly Expenses – January 2009

Here is the latest installment of my family’s monthly expenses. Without further ado here’s the breakdown:

  • $830.00 – Mortgage
  • $759.00 – Daycare
  • $664.10 – Health Insurance
  • peral-jam-frame-memories$484.69 – Electricity
  • $452.50 – Groceries
  • $180.00 – Pearl Jam
  • $175.00 – Student Loan
  • $158.23 – Misc Household
  • $146.84 – Clothes
  • $117.01 – Gasoline
  • $84.19 – Water, Sewer, & Garbage (quarterly)
  • $60.00 – Medical Co-Pays
  • $51.93 – Dog Food
  • $25.92 – Eating Out
  • $11.67 – Vehicle Expenses
  • $4.60 – Movies

For a grand total of $4205.68…Yowsers!

Even though I used to freak out when we were this high, I have a feeling that the $4000 range is where we’ll be at for the foreseeable future.

Biggest Budget Busters:

  1. $664.10 – Health Insurance – I’ve already talked about this expense in another post so I won’t dwell too much on it here. And I probably won’t put it here again since it’s now a steady part of the budget, but I wanted to include it this time so help account for the big jump.
  2. $484.69 – Electricity – Welcome to winter.  This was by far the highest this bill has ever been for us (for example last month it was only $207.88).  But December was unusually nasty this year, so I’m hoping for a lower bill next month.  I also made some adjustments which I’ll talk about in a future post.
  3. $180.00 – Pearl Jam – $40 of this is the price of 2 memberships of their fan club, and $140 is for the Super Deluxe Edition of the re-release of Ten. I know this was not a good financial decision, but no die hard Pearl Jam fan could possibly pass this up.  (Can’t wait for the 20th anniversary tour!).

Biggest Budget Breakthroughs:

  1. $84.19 – Water, Sewer, & Garbage  – This is about half of what it was just last quarter($159).  It makes no sense why it is so much less.  I should probably call the city to investigate, but I didn’t want to look a gift-horse in the mouth.
  2. $25.92 – Eating Out – This is the one area that the envelope system has really helped us out on.  We’re having trouble reigning in the Misc household expenses, but we’re doing a great job of limiting eating out.
  3. $4.60 – Movies – Actually this should probably be listed under eating out because this total reflects the price of a medium drink.  My wife’s parents treated us to a movie & popcorn, we only had to pay for our drink.  We went to see Gran Torino.  I don’t know about you, but I really like Clint Eastwood’s later work.

Well there we have it. I’m already a little worried about next month’s total because since I switched phone & internet service, the billing cycle is a little screwed up (notice it’s not on my list this month) and the first one is a doozy.   But it’ll all be taken care of by next month.

Until next time,

-DD

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