St. Patrick’s Day photo

This was a pretty bad month for us in terms of large, unexpected expenses popping up that didn’t fit into our targeted savings accounts. Our ‘Miscellaneous’ spending category was completely overwhelmed. We also incredibly overspent one of our variable expense categories. Even our targeted savings accounts didn’t fare well; one of them is now negative! But thankfully we have our buffer funds to help us smooth this out. The one success we had was a second month running coming in under budget for our groceries.

Kyle and I did our first draft of our taxes this month. We decided to use TurboTax this year to prepare our tax return, but we’re disappointed. We usually prepare our tax return manually. So far it hasn’t found any tax savings for us that we didn’t already know about and hasn’t saved us any labor. The good news is that thanks to our new little tax deduction we’re due a small refund. We had saved several thousand dollars to pay in additional tax so this was a nice surprise. We’ll get to distribute that unneeded savings to a few awesome places next month when we finalize the return.

Regular Fixed Expenses

Rent $1495

Water/Sewer/Garbage $130

Internet $74.45

Student Loan Minimum Payment $99.67

Netflix $10.74

Cloud Backup $5.99

Regular Variable Expenses

Power $314.78 ($60 budgeted): Wow, this is a crazy power bill! It’s over 2.5 times what we paid at this time last year. I saw an article, though, about how people all over Seattle are paying higher power bills because of the cold winter we’ve had. We’ve for sure used more energy keeping our apartment warm than we would have before because we don’t want DPR to be cold and she and I are home all day.

Groceries $540.29 ($600 budgeted): Yes! Two months in a row we’ve come in under budget. The big changes have been a new strict way of eating for me and buying groceries at a restaurant supply store. We are still meal planning and sticking with our grocery shopping list.

Restaurants $10.86 ($100 budgeted): Between DPR and my picky food choices, we don’t go out to eat any long. I’m happy with this. This charge was for ice cream cones that Kyle bought when a friend was visiting from out of town.

Gas/Parking/Public Transit $91.74 ($60 budgeted): Two gas fill-ups and four parking charges. DPR is done with her recurring medical appointments so we won’t have regular parking charges any longer, yay! Our car is getting terrible gas mileage now so we definitely need to take it in for a tune-up.

Phones $64.04 ($65 budgeted): Two smartphones with large data plans! Kyle uses Cricket Wireless and I use Republic Wireless.

Miscellaneous $253.07 ($8.48 budgeted): This is a laughable overspend! Kyle went skiing with his co-workers and paid for a lift pass and rentals. We converted $10 into quarters for laundry; we’re going through them at a slow rate now that we’re primarily using our portable washer. We bought an air mattress to replace the one I bought in 2008 that busted the last time we used it. We also replaced our sink protector.

Bottom Line

We spent $3,090.63 of $2,709.33 available. This was a serious overspend! We’re drawing down our savings account buffer to cover this.

Targeted Savings

Cars

Starting Balance $479.03

Saved $79.44

Spent $0

Travel

Starting Balance $1,925.00

Saved $450.00

Spent $1,167.60: We bought two sets of flights to California for trips in April and paid the registration fee for our 10-year college reunion!

Gifts

Starting Balance $290.00

Saved $95.00

Spent $20.00: We contributed to a group wedding gift for one of Kyle’s co-workers.

Appearance

Starting Balance $416.45

Saved $30.00

Spent $0

Electronics

Starting Balance $954.31

Saved $42.86

Spent $0

Baby

Starting Balance $213.10

Saved $0.00

Spent $355.55: This was a crazy amount of spending! We paid two months’ worth of co-pays for DPR’s recurring medical appointments. We renewed our babysitting referral service membership. We bought a baby gate to create a safe play area for DPR and a probiotic. We now have a negative balance in this “account” so we’ll just have to refill it ASAP.

Insurance

Starting Balance $258.33

Saved $108.33

Spent $0.00

What went down in your last crazy spending month? How were your power bills this past winter? What’s your opinion on using tax software vs. preparing your tax return manually?