DD’s Monthly Expenses – August 2009 – House Painting Edition

If you’ve been sniffin’ around here longer than a month then you already know that I track my family’s expenses.  Here is the tally for August:

  • $840.39 – Mortgage
  • $759.20 – Health Insurance
  • $337.48 – Groceries
  • $225.00 – Preschool Deposit #2
  • $182.47 – House Painting Supplies
  • $165.06 – Garage Door Repair
  • $135.00 – ladder-painting-farmhouseStudent Loan
  • $133.33 – Gasoline
  • $117.88 – Electricity
  • $113.66 – Dining Out
  • $103.85 – Phone & Internet
  • $96.06 – Beauty Products
  • $74.89 – Medical
  • $70.00 – Babysitting
  • $56.00 – Water, Sewer, Garbage
  • $55.00 – Fees
  • $52.31 – Household Misc
  • $43.25 – Kids’ care
  • $26.68 – Lawn care
  • $26.29 – Tennis
  • $25.00 – Gift
  • $23.89 – School Supplies
  • $22.26 – Dance class
  • $22.10 – Clothing
  • $15.90 – Car Maintenance
  • $14.00 – Haircut
  • $13.99 – Pearl Jam
  • $13.00 – Donations
  • $12.06 – Golf
  • $5.12 – Dog
  • $1.06 – Video rentals (redbox)

For a grand total of $3782.18.

Or to put it another way, $600 more than last month.

Biggest Budget Busters:

  1. $182.47 – House Painting Supplies – If it’s August than I must be attempting to paint my house.  The good news this time is that I’m actually making substantial progress.  I should also include Dinning out in this category because we ordered dinner on a couple of occasions(something we rarely do).
  2. $165.06 – Garage Door Repair – Much like some previous expenses, this really should be listed under stupidity.  Allow me to explain. Back in May I cleaned our garage.  As I was showing my wife the progress, my daughter grabbed the broom and started playing with it.  My wife took it away and put it right in line with the garage door tracks (Not noticing this of course).  Surprisingly it did a number on the door.  Which then caused a series of follow up problems.
  3. $55.00 – Fees – If only Flexo would’ve posted his tips on avoiding overdraft fees a few days sooner.  Throw in a couple of other late fees and you can get a sense of how out of sync we were in August.

Biggest Budget Breakthroughs:

  1. $337.48 – Groceries – This is more like it. We’re back to being well under the $400 range. I’ve said it before, but what’s really helped us is making a weekly menu based on what we already in the house and only getting the things we need.  We actually could see a $300 month.
  2. $22.10 – Clothing – We hit up a rummage sale that our neighbor participated in.  Her daughter is six months younger than ours, but she is much bigger so love getting her gently used clothes.
  3. $1.06 – Video rentals (redbox) – You loyal readers know that we love movies.  So we were rather excited when redbox came to town.  So far we’ve only tried it out once. Mrs DD picked out “He’s just not that into you”   Let’s just say that next time, I’ll be picking the movie out.

Since I’ve been keeping track of this stuff for over a year now, how about we have some fun with numbers shall we?  In other words…

~Let’s do the Time Warp~

Last August we spent $4170.34 so I’m glad we were no where near that total.  But much like our last time warp, I think not having to pony up for Daycare was the reason for our savings.

Looking back I got a kick out of myself griping about painting the house:

$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.

As I alluded to earlier, I didn’t get it done before winter.  Instead we had the antique farmhouse look going for us.  But mark my words, if the weather stays nice, it will be completed over Labor Day weekend.

Of course I’m also hoping to get some tennis in, so we’ll see…

Until next time,

-DD

P.S.   Another example of how sloppy we allowed ourselves to be last month.  I lost our last daycare bill(the one we got after I thought we were done).  Whoopsie.  So look for it next month.

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