This month was pretty weird for us personally because of Kyle’s agonizing decision, but fairly straightforward financially. We kept within our budgeted spending for our monthly categories, but then we had a bunch of irregular expenses as well. They didn’t add up to much until the very end of the month! I thought we were going to come in reasonably under budget, but… you’ll see.

Money Puddle

Our money puddle represents our gross income from May, less taxes, our tithe, and savings into our Roth IRAs. This is the source of all of our spending money for the month (before dipping into savings).

June 2015 Money Puddle: $1,960.83

Sources:

• Kyle’s postdoc paycheck
• Emily’s contract work paycheck
• Kyle’s side job paycheck

Spending

We came so close to meeting all our budget categories from last fall, which has been my goal. We went over our eating out budget by $8.77.

Housing and Utilities

• rent $910
• electricity $81.81
• internet $34.99
• cell phones $61.52: Our low cell phone costs are because I have Republic Wireless and Kyle has Cricket Wireless.
• water $35.97

celebratory dinner at a restaurant on Kyle’s Durham bucket list

Food

• groceries $408.54: Whew, barely under here! Meal planning is working!
• eating out $88.77: Just three meals out this month, actually – but two of them were on the expensive side. We went out once together to celebrate Kyle making the decision about his next job, he had a fast food meal after we went tubing, and we went out on the last day of the month to celebrate me getting a booking for this fall for one of my presentations.

Transportation

• gas $100.69: For the first time in months, I actually filled up my car with gas! We also drove up to northern Virginia for a weekend.
• oil change $37.98
• parking $5

Miscellaneous

• student loan payment $98.46
• Netflix $21.48
• printing $9.14: Kyle forgot to print his cover letter and CV at school before he left for an interview, so he had to print them after he arrived.
• personal care $48.95
• cards and gift $122.94
• bathing suit top $120
• lawyer retainer $500: We asked a lawyer look over Kyle’s new employment contract. They asked for a retainer of $500. We don’t know yet what they are going to charge us, but it should be around $500 or a bit less.

Reimbursed from Charitable Giving

• missionary support $50: This went to our second missionary.

Assessment

Money Puddle: $1960.83

Total Spending: $2,686.24

Difference: -$725.41

Dudes, we were doing so well this month until the veeeery end! The lawyer expenses just pushed us way over our income, obviously, but that is sort of coming out of future earnings from Kyle’s new real job. 🙂 But within the last few days of the month, we had a few unexpected expenses – I bought a bathing suit top for July 4 weekend, we gave a baby shower gift, and we went out to a celebratory dinner.

Have you ever retained a lawyer and if so how much did you spend? What fun summer activities are you doing?