Violet Sky

Ah, another high spend year. This is my second year tracking our spending in u/BloomingFinances excellent spreadsheet, which makes writing up this report particularly easy. As I noted to a friend while writing up this post, each year I seem to look at our spending and say, “Wow! That’s a lot!” and then make almost no adjustments going forward, so while my big shock for the year is how much we spent, I don’t foresee 2026 being any cheaper. Whoops?

Expenses

What did I say last year? Tada! That’s a-fucking-lot. Same sentiment this year, turns out. We are up in almost every single category, save for a few that are low spend anyway (those in the hundreds of dollars per year range, rather than thousands) so while I am initially tempted to blame the almost $20,000 we spent on a car in January of last year, it seems like everything just got more expensive, or we just spent more. I’ve mostly stopped following inflation and Fed decision drama (other than tuning into the stock market when JPow talks rates) so while things do, generally, feel more expensive, I’m not sure how much to blame inflation vs our own habits. I will point out that the price of boneless skinless chicken thighs went up again at Winco, to $3.78/lb. I remember when they were $2.78/lb not too long ago! Okay, it was over five years ago, but it doesn’t feel like that long ago.

Our vacation spending … wow. The trip reports live here in this blog, though there are a couple smaller trips that I didn’t bother reporting on. But most of the travel content is findable here, so I guess go back through the archives if you want to see what forty three thousand dollars in vacation spending looks like. I’d say we’ll do better this year, but with my sabbatical coming up, we’re going to be spending several weeks traveling internationally during the summer and that will assuredly not be cheap. Oh well, maybe next year?

Income

Mostly flat total income this year, though my income and my husband’s income are both up slightly from last year. I can’t remember exactly what our Other Income was last year that made it so much higher ($12k!) but clearly that isn’t happening this year, even with the ongoing expense reimbursements from work. I expect our overall income to drop in 2026, as raises and equity refreshers at work have been forewarned as positively anemic, but it was good to have another good year while it lasted.

Savings

A much smaller amount than last year, though not so small when you consider that we didn’t have $75k to deploy into our brokerage like we did last year. I had a goal of saving $6,000 in the brokerage this year, but fell far short, which is disappointing. However, even with the reduction my MBDR contributions to pay for travel this year, I still put aside a healthy amount in my 401(k), and our total savings was over $100k again, so it’s still a good savings year overall. I think this is the third year in a row we’ve managed to put aside over $100k – I hope to keep it going this year!

Conclusion

Another high spend year, though this time it is at least less of a shock, given that the same thing happened the prior year and it was pretty easy to see, as the year went on, that we were not going to be coming in under our previous spending. I do wish we had sent more towards our taxable brokerage, but given that our overall savings is not too shabby at all (understatement), it all worked out at the end. This was also the last year we had cash laying around unclaimed to backdoor into our Roth IRAs at the very beginning of the year, so now in 2026, we’ll have to actually think about how we’re funding those buckets. But! That’s a problem for next year’s report. For now, I wait to see how 2026’s savings and expenses shake out.