August Spending Analysis

First, a quick administrative note: they have blocked blogger functions at work, and so my blogging will now occur a little bit less frequently. I'm hoping to find the energy to continue blogging after work, maybe by emailing myself some posts. Also, while I can still read all of your posts, I am unfortunately no longer able to comment, so I'll try to remember to do that from home, too.

On to business!

August spending was a under a little bit more control compared to July's total of $4,203, which included a reunion trip to Vegas.

MONEY EARNED: $5574 (after FSA, health insurance, gym membership, taxes, etc. This is what is direct-deposited into my savings account each month)

Note: This is about $1400 more than what I earned in July for three reasons:
1) My promotion raise became effective Aug 1!
2) I maxed out my 401k at the end of July, thus no more 401k deductions
3) I maxed out my Social Security at the end of July, thus no more SS deductions

MONEY SPENT: $3,065

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

BREAKDOWN: (Last month's total in parenthesis)

Beauty: $86 ($124)- A mani/pedi combo, another manicure, and a bottle of a new perfume

Cash: $300- ATM withdrawals for items not listed below and to pay for lunches

Cashback Bonuses: $30- 5% back from Discover Card on gas and hotel spending, and a $10 Discover giftcard for spending $100 at a participating mall

Charity: $50- Colleague's Multiple Sclerosis bike event

Clothing: $197- Mini shopping spree at Banana Republic less the money I was refunded for my price adjustment, some new flip-flops, and a belt.

Dining out: $238 ($165)- Includes a promotion-celebration at Bertucci's, the bachelorette party meal, and the dinner out I bought for B's family to thank them for having me at their lake house ($130 for five people at a nice Italian restaurant- I thought that the bill would be twice as much, and was prepared to pay for it). The rest of my restaurant dinners were company/client-expensed.

Drugstore/household: $15 ($120)

Entertainment: $38 ($84)- BOGO Discover promotion for Wall-E tickets, and a magazine subscription renewal

Furniture: $0 ($420)

Gas: $58- To help B pay for gas on our road trips

Gifts: $53 ($141)- Gift for the wedding I will attend in San Francisco later this month

Groceries: $171 ($61)- Mostly comprised of my trip to COSTCO! This food will last me months (although I will have to restock the diet cokes soon!)

Poker/Gambling: $20- Includes a $100 poker game with my colleagues, a $5 game I lost to B's mom (was worth the $5 to not suffer the consequences of beating her, haha), and a $26 game for B's cousin's 26th birthday. I love that his family likes to play poker, but I wish I had a better poker face. Offsetting these losses is the $111 I won at the Saratoga Race Track on a $2 trifecta bet!

Rent + Utilities: $1513 ($1507)- $1375 rent, half of $165 for cable and $112 for electricity ($13 more than last month's electric bill)

Taxis: $137 Includes the $5-$6 taxi to get to work in the morning. This is discretionary, but I choose to save 30 precious sleeping minutes by spending $5-6/day to get to work by 6:30 a.m. (not to mention that it's too dark to walk safely in the winter). The additional taxis are used to get to/from B's place when I'm in a hurry- to get there by subway requires a transfer and takes at least 35 minutes, a taxi costs $12 and takes less than 10 minutes. It's always a tough call, especially if I'm carrying heavy bags or if it's late at night and I'm tired.

Travel/Lodging: $188 ($1025)- Includes $175 for flights to Richmond for the wedding I'm in this October, although $70 of it was credit from a flight refund. Also includes a shared hotel expense for my friend's bachelorette party in D.C. My train tickets were purchased via rewards from my Amtrak Mastercard.

Wedding related: $29 ($108)- Shared cost of the bridal shower gift for the bride who's wedding I'm in. This category is exclusively for costs related to that wedding (except for travel), which is why the gift I purchased for the other wedding is not in this category.


All of the money left over is now earning some fatty interest in my new HSBC account along with the bonus I just deposited. September will be a bit expensive with the hotel and rental car for my trip to San Francisco, but maybe I can reign in some of the other cost categories (or maybe play less poker! :P ).

Lowered my cable bill

I was inspired by a few posts I came across about getting discounts from cable providers just by asking, so I went ahead and managed a little deal of my own with Time Warner.

My cable bill for two people, with one regular cable box and two HD-DVR boxes and an HBO package, is $165/mo. I just cancelled HBO since I can't remember the last time I watched it, which will knock our bill down to about $150/mo, but that's still a lot. I do watch a fair amount of TV, and by "watch," I mean record it on my DVR and then watch it after work or on lazy Saturday mornings. Because I barely watch any TV real-time, my DVR is a very worthwhile expense, an extra $9.95/mo or so.

I called up Time Warner to see if there was anything they could do, any kind of deal I could take advantage of or something. The lady seemed to be very understanding, with a "yes, yes, let me take a look and see what I can do to lower your bill." My basic cable + internet service is $102.50/mo, and she offered to lock me into a $94.50 monthly rate for two years.

I asked a few questions: Will my service be exactly the same? Yes. If I'm locked in, do I pay some kind of penalty if I have to cancel service? Yes.

Well there you go- the catch! If I hadn't asked, I wonder if it would have been explained to me voluntarily. She said that the penalty fee of $150 is amortized over the two years, so if I cancel after just one year, then I only pay $75. I explained to her that I would likely be moving and cancelling service after the next year, and so to save $8/mo for a year and then pay a $75 penalty would only effectively save me $25 for the whole year, so thanks, but no thanks.

She then asked if she could put me on hold (sure), and came back after a few minutes with another proposal. She offered me $93/mo for one year, not locked in. Umm, better than the locked-in rate, with no cancellation penalty? Ok! Sign me up! After a year, my rates will go back to market rate, but I'm sure I can renegotiate at that point.

So there's another $9-10 off the bill, which will put us down to ~$140/mo. Still a lot, but that's $120 saved for EACH of us over the year.

Which I will be promptly spending this weekend at my friend's bachelorette party! Limo, hotel, dinner, drinks, lingerie gift... ugh.

I heart COSTCO!!! (and Weekend Potpourri)

I love Costco. I just love, love, love it. My boyfriend will argue that no person needs two gallons of mayonnaise, 36 rolls of toilet paper, or 40 AA batteries. I politely disagree (well, I agree with him on the mayo- yuck!). Especially in NYC when 4 rolls of toilet paper at the neighborhood drugstore go for $5+, my heart hearts Costco!

We were supposed to go to the beach yesterday, but woke up too late after seeing Wall-E (thanks to everyone who posted about the BOGO Discover Card offer at Fandango- NYC movie tix are $12 each!! I wouldn't have otherwise gone.) Instead of the beach, it was BF's idea to go to Costco, as he needed some new undershirts and dress socks, and since he's not picky, Costco would do. (Turns out, he is picky- they only had crew cut, and he likes V-neck t-shirts... oh well)

I spent $134, broken down:

16 cans of Progresso soups: $21.78 $1.36/can
32 cans of Caffeine-free Diet Coke: $8.49 $0.27/can
14 bars of Dove Soap (I hope I like them!): $11.90 $0.86/bar
6 cans of black beans: $4.45 $0.75/can
12 cans of green beans: $6.99 $0.58/can
Concentrated Tide w/ Downy: $19.99 81 loads= $0.25/load
10 Chapsticks: $8.99 $0.90/chapstick
8 cans of stewed tomatoes: $4.99 $0.62/can
3Q bottle of Tilex: $7.69 $2.56/quart
48 Swiffer wet pads: $12.79 $0.27/pad
8 boxes of whole grain pasta: $7.85 $0.98/box
48 Trailmix Bars: $11.99 $0.25/bar

I'll check on the math later, ha.

As part of my diet, I've been eating a lot of soup, veggies, and beans for dinner, and I've learned to like them, too! Finding them in bulk made me very happy. A woman in my building elevator asked me what I was going to do with so many green beans, and I happily said, "eat them!!" :-D

I'll try to give you a cost-savings analysis tonight/tomorrow...for example, I know that I pay $1-3/can of soup at my grocery store depending on size and type, but I think the cans I bought at Costco were smaller. If I have time on the way home, I might walk into my Gristedes tonight and take notes on how much my bulk items cost when I buy them individually at the store. This should take care of my groceries for a LONG while... the only other things I will need to buy on a regular basis are fresh lettuce and toppings for my salads and maybe some brown rice. You should have seen the huge bags of rice they have at Costco... no way am I tackling those! Of course, I don't have room to store 24 cans of soup in my tiny NYC kitchen, so one corner of my bedroom looks like a soup kitchen right now (no pun intended!) with stacks of canned goods.


Other weekend expenses:
*Bertucci's on Friday night+ RT on the Path: $51 total... my treat, to celebrate my bonus!
*Breakfast and coffee for two at Dunkin' Donuts on the way to BF's parents' house upstate Saturday morning: $9
*Lunch/dinner: provided by BF's fam + Bertucci's leftovers
*Entertainment: $14.50 BOGO Fandango tickets to see Wall-E Saturday night
*Lunch for two at a diner on Sunday morning: $18.50 It's been so long since I've been in town on the weekends that I forgot to make sure I had breakfast food in the apt! I actually ate a piece of cold pizza before both BF and I gave into hunger pangs and decided to get lunch.
*Dinner at noodle shop in West Village: $34

Most of my expenses this weekend were food related, but I acknowledge that this is a weekend luxury, and I don't eat out too much mid-week. These are also moderate eating-out expenses for NYC... dinner for two can easily run $100+ . During the week I eat a lot of soup/veggies/salad at home, or I go to client dinners that are paid for by the firm. I try to minimize the number of client dinners, though, because they are the primary attacker of my waistline :/

On another note, I got my lease renewal form on Friday. I have lived in this apartment since October, 2006, which has to be a record of some kind... I moved twice in my first 16 months in the city alone! Last year we escaped a rent-raise, but this year we were not as lucky. Our $2700/mo rent is going up 4% to $2808, which is not terrible as far as raises go, but it's more than what most people's income goes up by each year. And this is 'rent-controlled!' Further, our unit is not renovated, and as most of the units have been renovated since I moved in, I think the market rate for a new lease in my building is in the $3200-$3400/mo range. Insanity, just to have faux-marble countertops and a nicer stove. Hey, my stove may be older than I am, but it works and I'm not paying an extra $600/mo for it!

I have to find out if they will write a new lease for my unrenovated unit at the same $2808 rate, because my old roommate moved out this summer and my new roommate cannot put her name on the lease unless we open a new one. If it's going to be much more expensive (market rate versus our rent-controlled rate), then I will just keep her on as a subleasee.

(More) Reflections on July Spending

Ha, it didn't take me long after posting my July expenses to develop some serious thoughts on the matter.

Having been with my employer for three years, I make a good amount of money. $80,000/yr, my anonymous friends, to be exact. Given the high cost of living here, I'd say my adjusted income is more like $50-$60k. For example, my rent is $1375- and that's only MY share of the apartment! Total rent for the one bedroom apt is $2700, and we had to put up a wall to make a second bedroom! See how crazy it is?

But what's really crazy, is that my nice salary barely supports ME. Just one person- ME. Families of four+ can live off of this salary, but I still manage to spend more than I make (as you can see from this month). I don't have to pay for childcare, extra clothes/food, health care, I don't have car payments (although I do chip in for the BF's gas), and I while my rent would probably cover a decent mortgage, I don't have to pay condo fees/taxes, etc. So where does all of my money go? Well, some months it goes into clothes for my professional work wardrobe (July was an anomoly... hmmm), but mostly it's been going towards travel expenses. Granted, if I had a family to care for, I wouldn't be flying out of town every weekend, so I guess that makes up for part of it. But what this exercise has done is given me a lot of respect for the families out there that have to budget on less money than what I have, and still make sure there is some leftover for the future. Although, without making unfair assumptions, it's possible that a lot of families living beyond their means and are incurring debt to make ends meet. No surprise that money in America is tight.

July Spending

Yikes. For the first time in a while, I'm actually looking at what I'm spending versus what I earn. I usually spend less than I earn, because I have some leftover cash to toss into savings most months, but if I don't have much left over, I don't stress about it because I've got some hefty savings in place already. Now that I'm blogging about how I spend and save money, I would be remiss not to give my expenditures a good, hard look so that someday soon I can properly assess my spending categories and start to... gulp... budget.

I spent the last hour or so scouring my credit card and bank statements to analyze all of the money in and out, and here is what I've come up with:

MONEY EARNED: $4166 (after 401k, FSA, health insurance, gym membership, taxes, etc. This is what is direct-deposited into my savings account each month)

MONEY SPENT: $4,203 Oops.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

BREAKDOWN: (In alphabetical order)

Beauty: $124- highlights, including tip. Ouch :( The roots were looking pretty bad, I had no choice. But no mani/pedis this month, even though I really needed one before my trip to Vegas!

Cash: $300- ATM withdrawals for items not listed below, to pay for lunches and all the taxis I paid for with cash in Vegas

Charity: $50- colleague's Swim Across America event

Dining out: $165- includes drinks I bought in Vegas. This is considerably less than what I actually spend eating out in NYC, considering that client entertainment dinners are company-expensed.

Drugstore/household: $120

Entertainment: $84- two D.C. United Tickets

Furniture: $420- to buy my roommate out of her share of the stuff we bought together

Gifts: $141- my two best friends have birthdays in July, don't expect this expense next month

Groceries: $61- I stocked up on canned goods on sale. I love canned green beans! Ha.

Rent + Utilities: $1507- $1375 rent, half of $165 for cable and $99 for electricity

Travel/Lodging: $1025- not surprising. I acknowledged from the beginning that this would be my biggest expense category. Items this month include: various taxis (including the $5 taxi I take to work every day), transportation to/from airports (I always take public transportation, but the trains to the airports are still $15 or so each way), hotel at MGM Grand in Vegas, return flight from San Fran for the wedding this fall, two Virgin America flights to Vegas in December, train ticket from NYC to DC (return ticket was free via Amtrak Guest Reward points)

Wedding related: $108- down payment on limo for bachelorette party, but will be paid back by other attendants for part of the cost



This breakdown doesn't include the things I paid for in advance of this month, such as prepaid reunion costs (flights, show tickets, dinner, etc.). But I also paid for travel this month that I won't be taking until later this year. Since I don't have any new trips on the horizon (yet... those are dangerous words), I might not have any plane tickets to buy next month. Watch me eat these words later. Other one-time costs include the furniture buy-out and the birthday gifts for my two best friends. There are no August birthdays in my family, that I know of...

Next month I expect (money in) - (money out) to be a positive number, not just because I will be conscious of spending less, but my paycheck will get a boost! The 20% raise from my promotion will be effective (YEAH!!!), and I will max out my 401k with my bonus, so no more paycheck deductions. And at the end of August, I will have maxed out my social security tax- another boost to look forward to!

Paying for HBO

Last year, after a series of horrible displays of incompetence by my local cable company (Time Warner, I'm talking about YOU!), I wrote a letter to customer service (the phone reps were extremely unhelpful, and even more incompetent, I'm afraid to say) and they offered me three free months of HBO to compensate me for my poor service. Well, my roommate at the time became hooked and suggested that we renew the HBO subscription after the free period ended, so we've been paying ~$15.00/mo now for about a year. At first I found a few things on the channel that I liked to watch, but now that I am home less and less, I realize that I haven't watched anything on it in a few months.

Are any of you addicted to something on HBO that I need to check out? Between my roommate and I, it's only $7.50 each, so I could probably find enough to watch each month that would be worth that much, right? I don't even know if my new roommate watches the darn channel. I'm kind of too lazy to cancel it, in fear that I might be missing out on some awesome programming, so I need to poll you guys and find out if there's anything I need to watch, or if I should scrap the channel all together.

June Spending and Expenses

I've just paid the credit card balances on my June/July statements and thought it might be interesting to disclose my largest expenses... for the record, I do use credit cards to rack up those reward points, but I never carry a balance unless I'm purposely using a 0% interest-card, for which I always pay the balance in full when the interest-free period ends.

Amtrak Guest Rewards Chase Mastercard, balance from 6/13 to 7/12 : $895

Selected items:
Wedding gift at Crate and Barrel: $65
Car rental for the wedding: $44
Gas for rental car: $19
Cable bill: $165 (roommate pays me half along with rent)
Charity donation for friends' fundraiser: $50 (matched by my employer!)
Bed, Bath & Beyond for curtains and rod: $54 (included $12 savings using a $10 off coupon and a 20% discount on the most expensive item)
Two Virgin America flights from Las Vegas to NYC (BF purchased the flights there): $358

Discover Cash Back Reward Card, balance from 5/26 to 6/25: $683

Selected items:
Mini shopping spree at H&M: $50
Furniture at Ikea: $121 (YIKES! I don't even remember what I bought!!!! All I remember was the salad spinner, and that only cost $4!!)
Fancy dress to wear at upcoming weddings: $183
Outlet shopping in Freeport, ME: $300 (got some great deals on hiking clothes, work clothes and some fun summer stuff, all of which I've already worn- ya!)
Champagne for bridal shower: $163 (Will be split with co-MOH)
Cheesecake Factory lunch w/ best girlfriends: $35

This adds up to more than my balance, because I also had a credit applied for a dress I returned at Bloomingdales. I immediately turned around and spent that money on the "fancy dress" listed above.

Other expenses:
Rent: Whole apartment is $2700/mo, my share is $1375 (I had to buy my old roommate out of her share of the furniture we bought together, so I'm charging my new roommate a slightly higher rent-share to compensate me for using all of my furniture. My old share was $1465, as my bedroom is considerably bigger.)
Furniture share: $420 (I paid her 40% of the half she paid for our furniture to account for depreciation)
Electricity: $99, split with roommate
Transportation to work: $5/day comes out to $100/mo



Oh- I just remembered that what I bought at Ikea: two large mirrors to hang in the living room, which I should have remembered more easily, since it took more more than an hour to them hang all by myself.

While I don't budget (yet), I have to say that it helps to type out all of these items myself, as it makes a bigger impact than just reading my statement. I spent way too much money on clothes last month, especially because I wear work clothes 5/7ths of my life and on the weekends I usually just go to some of my old favorites. As I've been traveling every weekend, I just stuff my favorites in my suitcase weekend after weekend and so the other items in my closet are being neglected. (I started a large donation pile to address this problem). Thus, I should not be buying so many casual clothes at H&M, Old Navy, etc.... they just won't get worn as often as they should to make them worth it. As my mom used to say, "anything that goes on your a$$ is not an a$$et!!"

I spent more than $400 on travel-related expenses this month. That's actually less than what I spend on travel/hotels/cars most months, because the hotel was free. I paid for a hotel stay in Puerto Rico, but it was in early June, thus was on an earlier CC statement.

Also to be noted are the expenses I DIDN'T have this month. My hotel stay for the wedding I went to was free, because I had stayed at that hotel last year on a ski trip and they totally botched our reservation, so I wrote them a polite complaint letter, and they sent me a free-stay voucher. Yeah! I didn't think I'd ever be up in that corner of the world again, but it's a good thing I saved the voucher b/c it was less than 10 miles from the wedding! (My mom's other favorite saying is, "Don't underestimate the power of the pen!") I saved $190 on the hotel. I also bought my flights via a Jet Blue sale (paid for on my May CC statement) and was even awarded 50 extra True Blue points for it because it was during a special promotion. YEAH!!

Goal for next month: LESS SPENDING ON CLOTHES! I do not need more clothes!!! I also do not feel the need to stay on the forefront of fashion, so there is no need for me to be constantly buying clothes. Plus, I will not be buying clothes right now until I lose another five pounds, so that I'm not left with clothes that are too big once I fit into all of my existing clothes again ;P Too much weekend eating on all of my crazy trips, I guess.