I really spent a lot of time pondering how to structure this post. Normally, my year in review is just looking over our net worth spreadsheet, rambling the cliff notes to my husband, and calling it a day. This year was the first year that I closely tracked our spending, using the spreadsheet from this awesome Reddit post, so rather than just the highlights of “number go up” or abstract disappointments of “number go down,” I also have had to take time to really stare our spending square in the eyes.
This will have three parts – expenses, income, and savings – and I’m going to be using IRS rounding rules because truly nobody can care (not even me) about our spending to the penny.
Expenses
| Category | Yearly Total | Monthly Average |
|---|---|---|
| Housing | $26,422 | $2,202 |
| Gas (Home) | $1,088 | $91 |
| Electric | $832 | $69 |
| Internet | $1,046 | $88 |
| Insurance | $6,531 | $544 |
| Groceries | $22,228 | $1,852 |
| Eating Out | $15,467 | $1,289 |
| Gas (Car) | $3,027 | $252 |
| Travel | $37,375 | $3,115 |
| Vehicles | $6,553 | $546 |
| Gifts | $3,925 | $327 |
| Entertainment | $3,794 | $316 |
| Clothing | $2,584 | $238 |
| Trash | $356 | $30 |
| Home Improvement | $8,462 | $705 |
| Water | $1,420 | $118 |
| Phone | $3,745 | $312 |
| Education | $1,059 | $88 |
| Medical | $1,552 | $129 |
| Shopping | $10,658 | $888 |
| Charity | $63 | $5 |
| Pets | $2,231 | $186 |
| Misc | $14,728 | $1,227 |
| Total | $175,143 | $14,595 |
Tada! Wow, that’s a-fucking-lot. I’ve probably mentioned before that, for many years now, I’ve taken a “hit our savings goals and spend the rest” style of budgeting, so I was operating on a very rough estimate of our spending. This exercise crystalized several things for me, most of all that we spend way more money than I thought we did. Some of this spending came out of existing, longer-term savings, but most of it came from earned income one way or another.
Another thing that stands out here is that our core expenses, not the bare minimum but the overall “this is required for living in our society,” are quite low, all things considered – about $71,000, or a little less than $18k per person. This is actually reassuring to me, as one of the old anxiety exercises I used to do was, “Could we survive on the lower earner’s income if something bad happened?” and yes, with many concessions, we could. So that’s the good news!
I suppose this is where I should talk about the bad news. I don’t know if there is bad news – we were mindful of our budget the whole year, though not restrictive (obviously), and our spending comes out to about $44,000 per person, which is not the lowest, but better than I thought. Reading $175,000 still doesn’t feel great, but you can’t change what you don’t know, and now we know that we have a few areas with lots of wiggle room.
The elephant in the room is the vacation spending, and to that I say – I’m not really that mad about it. If spending $37,000 gets us 2 international trips and a handful of domestic ones, and especially if I get to see and experience new things while continuing to afford my daily life, then I can’t be that upset. One of our primary drivers for early retirement is wanting to travel the world, so unrealistically restricting our travel spending wouldn’t really be building the life we want, then saving for it.
Income
| Category | Total |
|---|---|
| Caterpillar | $263,465 |
| Husband | $73,644 |
| Dividends | $6,438 |
| Interest | $4,726 |
| Other Income | $12,981 |
| Total | $378,981 |
My base salary for most of the year was approximately $183,000, so the rest of the amount is accounted for in RSU vesting. Dividends include all those thrown off by our taxable brokerage and also those in our respective Roth IRAs, but none that might have been included in any other retirement accounts. All dividends are reinvested. The Other Income is perhaps a touch inflated by expense reimbursements from my job that count, but I guess they also cancel out the costs associated with them that ended up in our spend.
Savings
Now the fun part!
| Category | Savings |
|---|---|
| Roth IRA | $14,000 |
| 401(k) | $55,200 |
| 401(k) match | $7,297 |
| 457(b) | $23,000 |
| Taxable Brokerage | $75,000 |
| Pension | $5,921 |
| 529 | $6,200 |
| Total | $186,618 |
The only asterisk on this table is that we had $75,000 in long-term savings that we finally decided to move into the market, so that brokerage number is way inflated over our usual contribution. In 2023, we put $5,000 in the brokerage, for reference.
Even so, this was a great year of savings! Almost $112,000 in contributions, the vast majority of which were to retirement accounts, was definitely our highest year yet.
Conclusion
I’m left feeling a little divided about my assumed knowledge of our spending. On one hand, I’ve been roughly ballparking our retirement income need at $120,000 per year, so to find that we currently spend more than $50,000 more than that was not the best realization. On the other hand, if I had previously summed up our spending, I probably would have said, “We make a lot, spend a lot, and save a lot,” which is absolutely true. I periodically ponder whether we have enough flex in our budget to start contributing to my husband’s 403(b) option, and I suppose we do. Aside from the obvious (travel, food), having both the shopping and the miscellaneous category accounting for $2,000 per month of our spending probably means we could take a closer look there for some extra cash.
Ultimately, however, the goal of tracking our spending was not to identify areas to cut, but to get a baseline on our current spending, and then track how it changes as the kids grow up and age out of our care (or at least start paying more of their own bills). So maybe we’ll go looking for that 403(b) money… or maybe not!
Violet Sky 
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