DD’s Monthly Expenses – July 2009

Was your July as hectic as ours?

My wife shot three weddings, I was in two tennis tournaments, and we had a big 4th of July weekend too.

Uffda, no wonder we’re so tired.

For any new readers just joining us, I track my family’s monthly expenses.   Below is the tally for July 2009:

• $840.39 – Mortgage
• $759.20 – Health Insurance
• $407.58 – Groceries
• $177.00 – Babysitting
• $166.71 – Gas
• $125.99 – Tennis
• $125.00 – Student Loan
• $121.53 – Electricity
• $107.67 – Dinning Out
• $86.80** – Daycare
• $69.66 – Internet & Phone
• $60.41 – Dog
• $58.62 – Water, Sewer, & Garbage
• $53.00 – Donations
• $31.25 – Kid supplies (diapers & such)
• $20.00 – Medical
• $19.57 – Clothing
• $14.00 – Haircut
• $13.17 – Household Misc
• $10.59 – Shoes
• $5.00 – Kid fun
• $2.11 – Cosmetics

Grand Total of $3275.25

Now we’re talking.  This is one of our lowest months ever.  I guess it pays to do nothing but play tennis all month.

Seriously though, this is good news.  We need to be closer to the $3500 range than the $4000 range.  Hopefully we can maintain this level of spending for the next several months, or at least until I’m working full time again.

Biggest Budget Busters:

1. $759.20 – Health Insurance – I already wrote about why this is higher this month.   With all the talk about health care reform, I certainly hope something gets done.  But I haven’t really heard of any cost cutting measures so I won’t be holding my breath for the savings to be arriving anytime soon.
2. $407.58 – Groceries – As I mentioned in my coupon post, we’ve been making great progress in this area.  So what happened?  4th of July that’s what.  My wife’s family’s big celebration together is the 4th.  And we chipped in $75.71 towards groceries.
3. $125.99 – Tennis  &  $107.67 – Dinning Out – Tennis seems high but it’s for two tournaments, 1 mixed doubles league, and a racket for my son.  And one of the tournaments was out of town, so that meant going out to eat four times.  So that one trip blew two categories(3 if I wanted to count the gas too).   Worst part is I didn’t even play that good  🙁

Biggest Budget Breakthroughs:

1. $86.80 – Daycare** – As I’ve already mentioned, soon this category will go the way of the dodo bird.  This months total represents an outstanding balance we had.  Bye Bye Daycare.
2. $177.00 – Babysitting – In my Daycare Dilemma follow post, I mentioned we had some friends of ours kids lined up to help us out this summer.  The parents decided that we could go ahead and pay them hoping that it would teach the kids about money.  Its’ worked out alright I guess.  It’s obviously much cheaper than daycare, but my wife still gets interrupted plenty.  I guess you get what you pay for.
3. $13.17 – Household Misc – Much like last month, this total is lower than usual because I took your advice and started to break down what I consider misc.  As you can see, this month it wasn’t much at all.

Since I’ve been keeping track of this stuff for over a year now, how about we have some fun with numbers shall we?  In other words…

~Let’s do the Time Warp~

Last July we spent $3875.84.  So clearly we did much better this year.  But I think not having daycare contributed more to the difference than us actually spending less did.

Looking back, I see that we’re still spending our money on basically the same things that we were a year ago(Tennis, Dining out, & the Dog).

I especially got a kick out of me justifying/complaining about our grocery bill.

Oh well, I guess some things will never change.

Until next time,

-DD

**UPDATE** 8/5/09  Just yesterday I received yet another bill from daycare for an outstanding balance which was closer to our normal monthly expense of $600+.  I guess there was some kind of billing mix-up.  I thought it was weird that our last bill would’ve been so low, but I didn’t want to look a gift-horse in the mouth.

If you take this into account, our monthly total would’ve been in line with other months.  But still under $4K.   Now August will be higher, but that’s how it goes sometimes.