I did a quick run through in Mint the other day and saw something horrible…. It said I spent $58000 last year! Holy shit, that is way too much. And, to make matters worse, it wasn’t counting 9 car payments at $250 each and 10 mortgage payments at $700 each!** That’s an additional $9250 bringing my grand total to $67000, assuming Mint didn’t miss anything else. I know, I know, a portion of those mortgage payments go to home equity (about half). So maybe the final number is more like $63500.

This is an emergency. I need to set a goal and I need to set one now. There is absolutely no reason my household needs to spend this much money in one year. I am hereby setting a goal to reduce this number by $10,000 for 2013, to $53500.

In a way I find this kind of amusing. I’ve never really looked at how much I’ve spent before, only how much I’ve saved. The funny thing is, if you know how much you make, and you know how much you save… you obviously spend the rest.

Money Spent = Money Made – Money Saved

This is surprisingly simple and yet something I have never thought of before. The other amusing part is when I look at that $67000 number, for the life of me I can’t figure out where it all went. Even though Mint is, ahem, fucking telling me where it all went, I still can’t fathom it. We spent $7000 just on vacations last year! Granted, we had a great time in Las Vegas with Don and his wife, and I don’t regret it, but maybe we could plan our trips a bit better this year. We took at least three trips!

We also spent close to $13000 on vehicle related stuff, about $4000 of which was gasoline. Gasoline! About $6000 was due to the purchase of my wife’s new vehicle, including down payment and monthly payments. The rest was insurance and maintenance for the most part. Unreal.

The category in second place was Food and Dining. When I drill into that, I see $6200 in groceries and another $2800 in restaurants. I can’t say that the restaurant number is a surprise to me, but the grocery bill seems huge. I understand that we have a young child and have to buy diapers, and some portion of the year we were buying formula and baby food. But come on, six thousand dollars? We need to start shopping more at cheaper places, and maybe using some coupons.

We spent a bunch of other money too that I’m not going to get into now. What’s really killing me at this point is that I’ve been wanting to get a new-to-me car and gain a couple of doors to aid in transporting my young son. I was planning to spend somewhere around $25k on this vehicle to get something I really like (BMW 3-series), but is reasonably priced and reasonably old due to my short commute. No need for something brand new when you only drive 5000 miles per year. But now I feel like I might need to compromise a bit further on this purchase, and may need to rethink my options. I do still want to get a 4 door car, but maybe something cheaper, with better gas mileage is in the works. This blows. Maybe I can trade the wife in.

Just Kidding!

WTF. And another thing! I’ve recently skimmed through the entirety of Mr. Money Mustache’s blog, and he spends less than $30k per year. While I was reading that I was thinking that I wasn’t too far off from that, maybe $40k. Yeah right. Fuck.

**I had to do some account shuffling due to a bank closure and mistakenly deleted a bunch of history from Mint. So this missing information is not Mint’s fault, but my own.

Have you looked at the standings recently?  Today I’m in Paul’s rear-view mirror to the tune of $35,000–that’s pretty far back there!

If I’m ever going to catch up, I’ve got to get my spending under control.  Look at what Paul is doing with Lending Club, he’s saving money by bringing his lunch to work and then investing his savings!  Not only that, but he’s probably getting some health benefits as well, which is just good business.  I did a little analysis of the money we spend going out to eat and this is what I came up with.

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