Fancy Family Vacations and Other June Spending
A quick reminder: these spending reports are an effort to keep myself accountable to the idea that doctors do not have to spend a totally ridiculous amount of money to live well and love life. We’re trying to do these spending reports for every month of 2018.
As I have mentioned before, we do not do traditional budgeting. You absolutely should do traditional budgeting if that works for you as a way to control your spending. More on this topic here.
Notes About June
June included the end of school and not one but two different family vacations: a road trip to Albuquerque and Denver and a longer trip by plane to Illinois and Michigan. Per our usual, these trips were partially sponsored by our travel hacking hobby. The gas for the road trip was partly covered by IHG points, and the plane trip was pretty cheap thanks to the Southwest Companion Pass.
The amazing downtown loft we got to stay at in Denver and the gorgeous lake house we enjoyed in Michigan (featured in the banner photo) are great examples of why you should always say “yes!” when friends invite you to visit them.
We registered for the Imogene Pass Run this month, which is a scary enough race that it makes us want to spend all of our summer training, which turns out to be a healthy and cheap way to pass time. We are getting insanely spoiled having beautiful trails available out our front door and our jobs and daycare biking distance from our house. We are spending so much time outside that we dropped our gym membership (at least until late fall when it starts to get icy out there).
We paid less in rent than usual because we only had our lease until mid-month. We closed on our new house in May and our mortgage payments started in July.
We paid more for our phones than usual because our wifi was out for a long time and we were using satellite data for everything.
One fun thing about June is that it gives a whole half-a-year worth of our spending to analyze. Skip down to the end of this post to see totals for the first half of this year and estimates for the rest of 2018.
If you’re interested, check out our spending reports for January, February, March, April, and May.
Notes About The Numbers
-I have not included our charitable giving here, which can be a very sensitive subject for a lot of people (especially those who feel like they are drowning in debt). But unless you yourself are about to starve or freeze to death due to lack of basic resources, I recommend you find at least one charitable organization you are really excited about and send them monthly donations via auto-draft, even if it’s a small amount. Many charities desperately need people who can commit to monthly financial support.
-This list does not include our HSA, stock investments, or our real estate investments. I am planning to write more about how we approach our savings and investments at some point.
-This list does not include business loan payments, professional dues, licensing fees, malpractice insurance, or other expenses that are due exclusively to our business ownership and – unlike my student loans – would go away if I sold the business and switched careers.
-The student loan payment shown here is what’s on auto-draft. You can read here about how we are paying extra on our loans every month in an effort to be done with them this year. I include student loans in “home” spending even though they are related to my career because they don’t go away no matter what I do career-wise.
-We have health insurance and an HSA though my husband’s work as a teacher, both of which are deducted directly from his paycheck. It’s actually a pretty great deal, all things considered. We pay out of pocket for dental care and eye care services as needed.
-All “Entertainment/Dining” expenses are 100% optional expenses. For us, these tend to be things like going to the movies and eating at Chick-fil-A.
-I include life and disability insurance in this list even though they are sort of related to work, because they are what protect our current lifestyle. My disability insurance is expensive because it is important to us to be able to pay off all our debts and live well even if I am unable to work.
-“Groceries” includes food, household items, medications, and toiletries purchased at Sam’s Club or grocery stores or Walgreens.
-We are no longer paying for baby formula! Whoooohooooo!
-This list does not include at-home babysitters, who we occasionally pay in cash to watch our kids. Any at-home babysitters we pay are non-essential, although very much appreciated. The daycare/childcare shown is what we pay for while we are both at work (which is very much essential as long as we both want to work) and is listed under “Daycare/Childcare”.
-“Home Repair/Painting” spending probably overlaps with some of the spending I noted in previous posts about the costs of moving and May’s spending report, but that all got difficult to separate out so I went with the higher numbers in an effort to be more transparent about the whole thing.
Here is our home/family spending for June of 2018, in the form of the sophisticated screenshot from a Numbers document that you’ve come to expect:
And there you have it: we spent $5,039.77 in June.
That makes our grand total for the first half of 2018 $32,352.05.
Our most spendy month so far was March, which included our $815 family vacation to Maui, and was followed by our cheapest month in April, when we were probably just too tired to do anything expensive.
Bear in mind these monthly spending numbers don’t include the one-time mega-expense (or “investment” depending on who you ask) of buying a house and moving in this high COL town, which set us back $31,227.46 in May.
Assuming our spending stayed similar for the second half of the year, we could expect to spend about $64,704.10 for all of 2018.
In reality, our monthly spending will likely be higher now thanks to our new mortgage and higher daycare payments, despite our lower student loan obligation (which should hit zero by the end of the year).