Spending Report for April 2009
April 29th, 2009 | 10:26 am | Posted in Finance, Spending Report, Success | 10 Comments »
Last month I proclaimed that I would keep my expenses for the month of April under $2500.
I should have been more specific but, even still, I’m happy to report that my expenses for the month totalled exactly $2500.00.
I’ve put my wallet away until Friday so this is where the number will stay.
Here’s the breakdown for the month April:
- $1653.90 : Mortgage
- $153.59 : Natural Gas
- $124.01 : Business Expenses
- $112.91 : Electricity
- $109.26 : Cable/Internet
- $99.99 : Frivolous eBay Purchase
- $66.05 : Phone
- $66.04 : Gas
- $47.67 : Smurf Dolls
- $40.00 : Cash
- $26.58 : Grateful Dead T-Shirt
So, after just three months of paying attention to my spending, I’ve taken my expenses (that were previously an unknown grey area) from $4133 all the way down to $2500.
That’s a difference of over $1600!
Basically, I was blowing $400 per week on non-essentials… and thought I was doing a great job.
And really, even this month, I *still* managed to “blow” roughly $175 on Smurf dolls, some eBay junk, and a tie dye t-shirt.
That means that there’s still room for improvement…
April 29th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
Why are you leaving out groceries? That is the one thing that easily gets out of control in my budget.
April 29th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Great question — and one that’s come up before.
The short answer is that my wife pays for nearly all of the groceries. The more wordy (and somewhat defensive) version is here.
April 29th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
That is wonderful improvement! Perfect timing too with the Smurfling almost here.
In a few days I think I’ll be showing the opposite trend
May 1st, 2009 at 9:49 pm
[...] Cash: Didn’t make as much progress here as I would have liked but that’s because I threw a cool grand towards the U.S. Treasury. That’s right — I had an extra $1k hanging around last month. [...]
May 12th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
[...] last month’s success at curbing my spending, I think I thought that I was going to give it another go this month, and then the month after [...]
June 3rd, 2009 at 8:13 am
[...] last month I curbed my spending all the way down to my self-imposed $2500 [...]
June 30th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
[...] was keeping my spending in check for a few months (April was amazing) there but now I’ve officially gone off the deep [...]
August 6th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
[...] That’s over three times as much as I spent in April. [...]
September 2nd, 2009 at 8:15 pm
[...] know that I can get by on as little as $2500 per month — I did it in April — so why have I been so far over every month [...]
February 28th, 2010 at 9:36 pm
[...] isn’t the smallest sum that I’ve ever reported but it’s pretty [...]