HisHersMoney

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!

I don’t work at home full time but I do get to at least once a week. It’s great because I literally roll out of bed, grab a cup of coffee and boot up my computer and instantly I’m “At Work”. The hour it normally takes to get ready and go to the office is totally negated. Since I’m able to start work an hour earlier I get to quit for the day a hour earlier.   

Every day I work from home I always tune into Oprah at 4pm. I really enjoy watching the show and for some reason I’ve lucked into seeing almost all of the episodes with Suze Orman. Today’s episode showed a number of individuals and families who want to spend some amount of money on something they want. Suze summed up all the figures and showed them whether they could afford it or not. The audience also had the opportunity to chime in with their vote.

It was amazing that even faced with the figures, everyone’s opinion and Suze’s expert opinion some people just didn’t get it.

I personally am kinda wanting a wii. I’m thinking that my husband and I can play some of the interactive games and the wii fit and do something together other than sit and watch tv. I know we can afford it and if we went on the show Suze would definitely say “Approved” but I’m having a hard time justifying it to myself.   

I got a new Blackberry! Yay! Best thing about it: it didn’t cost me a penny. This one was compliments of my company and resides on their monthly bill. The first thing I did was go online to my cell phone bill and delete the Blackberry option off of my personal phone which will save me about $30/month.

There are pros and cons to this deal that everyone can point out:

Pros: Save $30/month, new sleek phone, easier access to company email

Con: easier access to company email 24×7

I don’t think this is really going to make a difference in my company email responsibilities, I really don’t get very much email outside of business hours and I’m really not expected to respond to any outside of business hours so for me I think the whole situation is really just a good thing.

I have had my personal phone number for about ten years so I don’t plan on getting rid of my phone completely but plan on just using it for texting and talking with friends.

We got a few emails after our last post regarding savings asking us if that was all we were putting away each month. The answer is No. If you included our 401k contributions and all retirement savings the actual amount is about $5400 a month.

What goes into this total:

Full Roth IRA savings for two, Savings ING, & Full 401k contributions for two

That is a total of over $64,000 a year!

We are currently trying a cash only system in order to help save us money. Whether it works or not we’ll see over the next two months. Our plan is to take a certain amount of money out in cash every two weeks and then have to live on it.

We started out with $200 last Sunday and currently have $35 left. I don’t have the exact amounts of what everything cost but here’s pretty decent estimates of where it went so far:

Rx and vitamins $16

Sunday morning breakfast $15

Tip for valet $5

groceries $50

eyebrow wax $12

Dry cleaning (we had a lot this week) $35

Sushi take out $32

So far I think we are doing ok but I’m not sure how the $35 is going to last us all week but I’m sure we’ll survive. I think our long term plan will be to go with $150 a week which needs to include food, misc expenses and entertainment but this week we had an expensive meal out for Valentines day which we used the debit card for so we left more in the account.

I will leave HIS to post about the valentines dinner and other valentines related info.

Right now in our joint savings we only have $2119! That is embarrassing! We have the following accounts set up with ING: House Down Payment, Car Repairs/Down Payment, Joint Emergency Savings, Investment Savings & Vacation Savings.

It is reasonable to assume that the Vacation Account would occasionally be pretty empty as it is now because we just came back from a couple vacations. But the others really need some work! I just really combed through the budget and set up recurring deposits to the accounts in order to expedite our savings growth.

I have set it up to put $1,500 a month into our ING. We had set a goal of $22,800 for the year. Obviously we are not off to a great start! We also have a few other small savings vehicles, TD Ameritrade through the Suze Orman deal plus I”m currently putting a couple hundred a month back into my (Her’s) savings account to reimburse myself for the $7k I put down on the car. Obviously it will take 35 months to actually reimburse the amount, but every little bit helps

Her entered the marriage with about $19k total in savings. $7k of that Her put as a down payment on her BMW but there is currently about $12k in savings which Her regularly contributes to by putting any left over amount from her “allowance”.

Can we still make our goal of $22,800? I’m not sure but there is no reason why we can’t try!

Everyone knows that this is Inauguration Weekend here in DC. We actually live in Northern Virginia about 6 miles outside of DC so personally I haven’t had to deal with much traffic or crowds. We aren’t going downtown for the actual Inauguration or Parade tomorrow but we are going to attend one of the 10 Official Inaugural Balls.

The Official Balls are those that are put on by the Inauguration Committee and Obama will be making an appearance at each one of them tomorrow night. From what we understand he will say a few short words and he and his wife will dance one dance at each one.

I am so excited to be able to attend one of these balls. We are actually attending the Commander in Chief Ball which is hosted by Obama and is exclusively for members of the military. I saw on the Entertainment Online website that they are covering the Official Balls which makes it even more exciting.

An event of this kind requires some preparation and the purchase of a new dress. I was surprised to realize that I really didn’t currently have a basic black full length dress. I headed out to the Tyson’s Corner mall which has all of my favorite stores plus many more that aren’t always quite in the budget, but unfortunately everyone was there looking for dresses!

After about 3 hours of searching high and low I finally found a dress! It’s from JS Boutique and it is beautiful!

We joined a group of friends in the Poconos Mountains for a trip of the New Years holiday. We were lucky enough to be able to stay at a friend’s family cabin and not have to pay for a hotel so that really helped minimize the out of pocket expenses. We spent four full days up there and went skiing two of the days.

We budgeted $500 for the trip. This was to include gas, food, skiing, etc. So, how did we end up? $474!

Skiing for two people Day 1: $80

Skiing for two people Day 2: $90

Our portion of the food bill: $130

Gas: about $50

Misc food and drinks after skiing: about $100

Bottle of liqueur: $24

This really was a great trip for us. A couple days of skiing, New Years with a bunch of friends (there was seven of us total) and under $250 each!

It’s official, one of our cars is now paid off! We had a balance of around $4300 left on the loan which we just paid off when Her received her year end bonus. It felt so good to call up the bank and tell them to just deduct the remaining loan amount from the checking account and then to able to log back in online and see the loan simply gone from account listing!

We have an extended warranty on the vehicle which covers it bumper to bumper for the next 27 months so we plan on keeping it for at least that long!

What are we doing with the $455 a month that used to be used to pay the loan? It’s going in savings. We set up a sub account at ING called our New Car Fund. Hopefully by the time we need a new car we can either pay cash or at least put a nice down payment on it to minimize the loan.

Unfortunately we still owe about $35k on our other car loan so that one won’t be paid off for while, but we knew that when we bought the car last fall!

Well, we have officially scrubbed our budget as much as we can for the upcoming 2009 year. Our goal is to bulk up our cash savings account as much as possible. In order to do this we have decided to go to a cash system for our weekly grocery, incidentals and entertainment portion of the budget. We will take $150 out each week and that will be it, if we spend it all in one days then it will be 6 very dry days until next payday rolls around!

When reviewing our spending from 2008 we really didn’t over spend on any one thing, but it was the $12 here, $20 there etc that really just added up. By going to cash we are really going to have to make an actual decision every time we spend. It was so much easier to pull our the debit card knowing that there was money in the account to cover it.

We both get an allowance of $300 a month to do with what we want so if we really want to do something and our budgeted money is gone we can easily dip into our personal funds if we choose to but what we aren’t going to do is get more money out of the joint account!

Currently it looks like we should be able to save $1900 a month. I have gone into our ING account and set up automatic recurring deposits for these funds which are spread out between various sub-accounts.  This will give us $22,800 for the year.

What is our plan for this money?

1. Money for Christmas next year

2. Emergency Account

3. Vacation Account

4. New Car Account

5. House Down Payment Account