Can I still, like, use this? It’s not all that damaged, yeah?
Another month, another expense report. This time it’s November.
| Category | Total | Notes |
| Mortgage | 793 | |
| Taxes | 320 | |
| Groceries | 332 | Hosted thanksgiving for 16 people, significantly driving up food costs. |
| Restaurants | 96 | 5 work lunches@$6 ea. 4 nights out. |
| Utilities | 35 | Electricity. No oil bill. |
| Cable | 70 | Phone, ISP, Cable. |
| Cell | 27 | Ting. Went over on Data this month, bumping my bill from 17 to 27. |
| Medical | 0 | |
| Pharmacy | 7 | misc |
| Clothes | 0 | |
| Café/Coffee Out | 31 | high |
| Entertainment | 77 |
|
| Gas | 92 | |
| Vitamin A(lcohol) | 0 | |
| Vacation | 394 | Short trip to NYC to see a band’s farewell performance. Goodbye, Black 47. You are the proudest group of Irishmen on planet Earth. Total includes train ride, horrific hotel, food costs, and ticket. And maybe a round or two of beer. |
| Charity | 20 | Annual wikipedia donation |
| Amazon Misc, some entertainment | 84 |
|
| Total | 2378 |
Lots of personal spending this month.
- Most significantly I took a $400 overnight vacation-type-trip to NYC to see a band with some old friends.
- Also spent some $250 on groceries to host Thanksgiving for our family. My half of this cost was $125 and is reflected in the grocery spending.
- Bought some misc. convenience items on Amazon this month. Also, a few additional ‘entertainment’ type purchases, like race registration and a video game package.
If this is what a so-called spendy month looks like for me, I’m in good shape. I thought things would look worse — during the month I felt like I was really blowing through money like crazy but it doesn’t end up looking all that bad.
Yearly Total
| January | 2106 |
| February | 2013 |
| March | 2305 |
| April | 2043 |
| May | 1876 |
| June | 3036 |
| July | 2109 |
| Aug | 2218 |
| Sept | 2765 |
| Oct | 2017 |
| Nov | 2378 |
| Total | 24,866 |
Net Worth Update
| Taxable Mutual Funds | 293K |
| Taxable Cash (CDs) | 40K |
| Retirement 401(k) | 318K |
| Retirement Roth | 102K |
| Home Equity | 125K (?) |
| Total | 878K |
Markets tick up — a 12K NW rise from last month and a new all-time high.
Numbers crunched 11.30.2014
Sticky notes on expense tracking
- The expenses listed represent half of our total household expenses. I’m 50% of a DINK couple. The same is true for net worth. I only list my personal stash — my wife has her own and I’m not tracking it on this blog. Yeah, we’re completely spoiled.
- You’ll notice that there is no mention of car insurance here. I pay my premium annually in June. There’s a 10% discount for paying 12 months in advance, which is a pretty good return on investment.
- Similarly, there’s also no mention of home insurance. We pay the yearly premium annually in full every March.
- There are menus at the top of the blog (Finances->2014->Month) if you are interested in additional reports.
- I’ve also logged an account of my financial history
Living a FI 
Your grocery expenses are really good, month to month. I always get a horrible surprise when I add up food shopping. It’s our biggest expense next to the mortgage. I went gluten free a while back and that has made things even worse. If in doubt – make soup!
Re: Gluten-free: Do you have celiac? Definitely avoiding all gluten can drive costs up. We do bulk shopping at costco for staples, supplement it with trips to NE’s best grocery chain (Market Basket), and this helps us hold costs down. I also eat what I think of as hack-job lunches, full of odds and ends, which helps us to work through all of our food rather than waste it. Today, for example, I cobbled together an old sweet-roll, some soy milk, cauliflower, and half a ham sandwich. Most of this is left-over from Thanksgiving.
Don’t waste you time with FC Blood Dragon, I thought it was a terrible, terrible game. I lasted 15 mins, most of my mates didn’t even give it that long.
That’s really disappointing. I was hoping the dinosaurs with laserbeams would make it decent? Still working my way through vanilla FC 3 which I’m finding to be enjoyable overall — missions are just OK but the sandbox structure is fun, like hunting white tigers with a bow and arrow, rambo-style.