HisHersMoney

As a result of our upcoming housing costs savings I spend a little time on the budget.   Currently between Him and Hers we get four paychecks a month. Usually our rent comes out of His paycheck in the amount of $1175 out of each check to make up our $2350 rent payment. (Rent is very high here!) Rather then split our rent payment in half each month we will just take it out of the last paycheck of the month in its entirety $1350. This will obviously fee up some additional money each month.

Our first priority is to replenish our savings since we raided them a couple months ago to buy the ski condo. We figure that we really need about $30k in savings as an emergency account as well as to have some cash on hand to do things we want to do. Another priority is our Roth IRAs. We are eligible to contribute the entire amount to a Roth IRA this year so we need to take advantage while we can, I’m afraid we will be phased out of our eligibility in the upcoming years.

Currently we only have $1300 put in to Hers Roth so far this year so that leaves another $8700 to go in order for both of us to max out at $5k each.

Our savings account is currently at about $3,000 so we still have another $27,000 to go there!

Our new budget calls for us to put around $1000 a month aside for out Roth IRAs with the final contribution to hit our max coming from Hers year end bonus

In watching the Suze Orman episode on Oprah I was surprised and how much people spent on their monthly “expenses”. In most cases it was within $150 to $200 of their monthly income leaving no room for any unforeseen expenses. There was a young couple around our age with no children. Their take home was about $7900 a month and their monthly expenses was about $7700.

It made me go back to our budget to see how this compared to us. We live in a very high cost of living area so I can’t imagine that their costs of living were really any higher than ours.

Cars, insurance, gas $1000

Rent $2350

Utilities, phone, cable $350

Misc, gym, etc $115

Allowances (both of us) $400

Food / Entertainment $600

Him St Loan, debt $275

That’s a total of $5090

I don’t understand how these people’s expenses are $7700!