I think I said the same thing last year around this time… I’d like to start tracking my spending better and posting about it monthly. Hopefully this will help hold us accountable. It’s my feeling that we spend way more than we need to, so here’s the first update.

First let’s talk about the layout. The guidance column is what we spent last year on average, give or take. It’s not perfect, but close. The ‘Total Remaining’ row indicates how much money we netted at the end of the month given all of our income, spending, and scheduled saving. In the ‘Bills’ section, the ‘Other’ row indicates all unplanned spending outside the categories of the rest of the bills. For example, in March we payed income tax due to filing our return, so that was an unplanned expense. The ‘Scheduled Savings’ section indicates all non-retirement automatic savings that happens every pay period. Other than the generic ‘Savings’ row, most of the ‘Scheduled Savings’ is marked to be spent later. When spent it will show up in the ‘Bills’ section somewhere.

Now for some analysis. This month was a little bit odd because my wife and I both got paid three times. Stating that, I would have loved to see a much larger net gain in cash at the end of the month due to the extra income, but the taxes blew that right out of the water. A little more than half of our ‘Other’ spending was income taxes. Yuck. Our tax rate has stayed pretty steady the past few years, so we’re working on getting the proper amount taken out of our paychecks so we don’t get hit with this surprise again next year.

We spent more on house cleaning than usual, but that’s because my cleaner comes on payday, and I’ve already stated that happened three times in March .

Dining out looks to have been a bit large last month as well. I didn’t look to see where all of that went, but it’s about double our average spend last year. We’re on track to bring that down this month, as we’re at about $93 spent dining out and we’re halfway through April.

Given everything, we would have netted about $2200 without the tax surprise. I think I would have been fairly happy with that given our current spend rate. I’m going to chalk this up as an ok month given we haven’t done much yet to curb spending. Look for some posts in the near future about how I plan on cutting some spending.

Thanks a lot, stock market!  I thought we were friends…

A good month for cash, but a bad month for our retirement savings–it’s a good thing we’ve got 35 more years to go!  I set up a retirement goal in Mint.com just to see how they’d do with an extremely long term goal, the good news is that we’ve only got $4.5 Million to go!  I immediately deleted the goal.

So what happened this last month?  The biggest hting form is that I got numbers instead of estimates for Anna’s 403b balance along with her car loan: we owe more money on the car than I thought.   However, knowledge is power and we’ve now got another clear target for the Savings Laser.

We accumulated cash more slowly than we have in the last few months, the result of a few factors.

• Anna drove many hundreds of miles to come visit me where I was out of town for work.  That was about $200 extra in gas.  Also, there was some restaurant spending on that trip we normally wouldn’t have done, so throw another $100 on it.
• We spent almost $300 on gifts in May.  2 baby showers, 2 high school graduations, a couple of love gifts and a get well soon just about cleaned us out.
• Threw a party to celebrate being back in town, so that set us back about $100.

All of these unexpected things fly in the face of my desire to totally smooth out our spending and make it 100% predictable.  Sadly, that’s just never going to happen, but a man can dream.

July should see some big drops, as I’m going to break ground on the deck/hot tub project really soon and spend probably around $6k on that.

The results for last month:

• Another decent cash accumulation month due to my wife’s extra paycheck. I hope to see this continue its upward trend as we are still slowly saving towards a down payment on our next home.
• Credit card debt is up due to the purchase of an iPad and some future vacation spending. However, both of these items are covered by “targeted savings”, so technically the money was spent already anyway. Targeted savings accounts are almost like Accounts Payable on a companies balance sheet in that respect. I guess they should subtract from my net worth from the get go, but I always have the option of not spending that money, unlike a true account payable. Therefore I’ll continue to track it as an asset until spent .
• Another decent month as far as my investments go, but I’m expecting to see this slow or even reduce in the coming months after the recent run-up that we’ve had. I’ve been wanting to get into some individual stock investing, so I’m actually hoping for a decent drop in the market to hopefully find some value picks.
• The value of our vehicles is showing an odd uptick this month, likely due to gas prices. My motorcycle and car are both good on gas, so they’re value must have increased because of that. Again, overall vehicle value will take a decent drop once my wife’s new car becomes “used” according to NADA guides.

I have no excuse, other than sheer laziness.

So I’ve been inspired by Paul’s Net Worth updates, his table puts all of the relevant information in a nice easy to grok format, and I need to spot being so wordy when I describe my latest financials.  So here goes:

Once again Zillow.com is messing with my emotions, and I lost $10,000 bucks in my house.  Other than that, I traded in some cash for credit card debt, and I made an investment.  I heard some interesting things about a company with a very cheap stock: Torvec (TOVC).  I am not a financial advisor, and I have no idea how they’re really going to perform, but they have some interesting technology and a can-do attitude.  I think it’s going to work out for them.

If not, I’m only out $500 bucks.

This is by no means a new study–it came out last year–but thinking about mine and Paul’s  incomes made me want to dig it back up.  It’s been written about in several different places over the past year.

Researchers at Princeton poured through years of collected survey data in which respondents recorded their daily feelings of well-being.  They were looking for a relationship between income and happiness and they came up with some interesting results.

As income decreased from $75,000, respondents reported decreasing happiness and increasing sadness and stress. The data suggest that the pain of life’s misfortunes, including disease, divorce, and being alone, is exacerbated by poverty.

“We conclude that lack of money brings both emotional misery and low life evaluation; similar results were found for anger,” write the authors in the report. “Beyond $75,000 in the contemporary United States, however, higher income is neither the road to experienced happiness nor the road to the relief of unhappiness or stress, although higher income continues to improve individuals’ life evaluations.”

Basically, if you already make $75,000 per year, don’t expect your next raise to make you feel any more happy than you already do–the happiness effect just about plateaus there.

Sadly for Paul and I, we have already reached this level.  So while we can expect to experience improved life evaluation, improvements in general day-to-day well being will have to come from somewhere else.