| House | 1464 |
| Truck pymt | 285 |
| Car pymt | 284 |
| Stu Loan 1 | 190 |
| Stu Loan 2 | 370 |
| School/daycare | 470 |
| Car Ins | 112 |
| Life Ins | 26 |
| Trash | 20 |
| Cable/Internet | 130 |
| Electric | 110 |
| Cells | 175 |
| Sirius | 15 |
| Groceries | 400 |
| Gas | 200 |
| Personal* | 50 |
| Entertainment* | 100 |
| Misc Expenses* | 50 |
| TOTAL | 4451 |
| *estimated |
I wasn't really sure what we pay on those last few categories so I honestly guessed based on receipts from this month.
A couple things:
What I noticed right off the bat is that our expenses are super high. Besides that, though, our take home pay (after health insurance, short and long term disability, 401k contributions, and automatic payments to savings) is typically around $4600-$4700 a month. So where is that $150-$250 extra going? My expenses, big as they are, don't total that amount. And that's just an average month....if my husband does well commission-wise, we bring home MORE than that. I guess that's why I have been haphazard about debt repayment, which you'll notice isn't included here. I'm throwing $10 here, $20 there at it with no rhyme or reason. No wonder we're all over the place.
What are we spending our money on?
The only good news is this: without trimming anything out of our budget, or adding any additional income to our cash flow, we now make enough to cover all our bills plus have money left over towards debt. I think with a little tweaking we can free up a big chunk of cash towards getting rid of this burden.
I'll tackle the bills in the next post. I know a lot can be trimmed, so I will do a line-by-line analysis next.
Ok so take from my advice what you can use and feel free to disgard the rest. Here are a few things I would do if it was my budget:
ReplyDeletePut the student loans on hardship deferral (not forbearance). You can usually apply for it online. They are usually pretty easy to get since they keep charging you interest but if you had those payments every month in your snowball it would be huge so keep trying to get the hardship deferral.
Car Ins. maybe a little high. Shop around and see if any place offers discounts (I get a discount because of the College I graduated from and it's a good sized discount.) You never know.
Cells: Consider getting trac phones. We use the $10.00 for 30 Min and talk to our friends online. Oh and if you have a house line you may want to get rid of that too.
Cable/Internet: Yeah we don't have a TV I know not for everyone but now on newer computers you can get the shows you'd want to watch online. We only have internet and it saves a lot.
Electric-try using a drying rack for laundry, if you have elec hot water add a timer, and try keeping TV, computer off or unplugged when not in use.
Siris: Dude! You can get radio for free! lol alright to each his own but $15 for radio is $180/yr.
Gas: Probably nothing much you can do there but ck into car pooling with coworkers.
Personal/entertainment/Misc I'd get rid of. Put a reward of entertainment after you hit a goal, like every 2K in debt paid or 5K, something like that. It gets the kids on board too.
Getting rid of radom spending is KEY. If it isn't in the budget at the beginning of the month it doesn't get bought. Unplanned spending is what will kill the budget.
I hope that helps...like I said use what you can and get rid of what doesn't work for you. You are doing AWESOME just by having it written down. Keep on going forward!!! You are doing great!!
Thanks Freebird! You have some awesome ideas and I appreciate the feeback.
ReplyDeleteI think the cells and the cable are the two biggest ones we can cut right away. We can't do Trac Fone because my husband has to use his personal cell for business, so he needs a lot of minutes in his plan as well as a data package. But, I also have a data plan which I could drop and save $25 a motnh right there. We do get to deduct a large portion of the cell bill on our taxes since he uses it for work, but the bill is very high. We don't have a land line.
I shopped car insurance last fall and went with the lowest price, but I can certainly check again.
Cable we could definitely reduce or cut.
I acutally can apply for a deferral on my student loan (the smaller one) because I am currently enrolled in grad school. My employer pays for grad school and I am three classes from finishing a master's - and it's free. But even though my employer pays for school I am still eligible for in-school deferement.
I will check on deferment for my husband's too.
What are your thoughts on 401k contributions? I could cut them, but hate to. I contribute 6% and my husband does 7% and we get 100% match from our employers.
Very cool on being able to defer the student loans..It will make a BIG difference in your snowball especially once you are working on the truck...with both student loan payments working with the truck payment plus what your spending on entertainment/misc./personal that's AT LEAST $1000.00 a month on the truck!!!
ReplyDeleteWe're self employed so we haven't had to deal with giving up an employee match but I hear Ramsey get a lot of calls on this. I can say from our experience that I agree with him on this but I can understand it would be hard. He says to stop 401K contributions cuz it's the focused intensity that gets you out of debt...every cent makes a difference.
I really have to agree. I was shocked by how our small changes added up to something like 25K a year when we started our blog. Up to you of course but if it was me I'd stop them just until we were out of debt.
You are off to a great start! This is SO doable and once you start making progress you are going to be surprised how fast you get out of debt!!!
I just checked our student loans- we're not eligible to defer my husband's. :( Mine is good to go until I get out of grad school - which will be about another year.
ReplyDeleteI am very tempted to pay off our last medical bill with my second October paycheck and just be DONE with medical debt. Dave of course would tell me to funnel that into the Efund and be done with BS #1 by the end of October. I don't know...we'll see.