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Financial musings

October 13th, 2015 at 07:02 pm

First we are doing better this month on groceries. We've spent $45 on alcohol so far and have enough beer to last the month, $57 on eating out/coffee shops, $242 on groceries and honestly we are good enough for the week. So I think we are on track to spend $150/week this month or around $600-750. I think spending around $150/week = $650/month which seems reasonable for a family of 4. Last month and even some of this month's costs are still us rebuilding our stockpile and necessities. Plus $650 for groceries and spending very little on eating out compared to previously I think is a huge savings. Last month spending around $1200 on groceries freaked me out a lot.

Second we are debating whether to do a Roth IRA this year. We have until April 15th to decide. We usually wait until January 30th anyway to see where our income lands. This year we may be able to do a roth IRA without doing a backdoor rollover Roth. We did manage to max out DH's 401k before he left his job. But it's $11k we'll be tying up instead of having in cash. My preference is once he's in his bootcamp in February we move the money if we think he's going to land a job asap. Or if I land a job sooner.

Third our utility bills are ridiculously cheaper. It's 20% of what we used to pay. A full month of electric and gas and we paid a combined $83 for the month! This is with a very inefficient furnace and refrigerator. I can't believe it. We did use 404 kwh of electric instead of our base usage of 900 kwh. In our last place our water heater was electric and we never changed it to natural gas because of the location it was impossible. Second we used 28 therms to heat the house where we are now and it $35. Insanity. We were on a budget billing for both electric and natural gas in our last place to help even out the winter costs and we were budgeting $250/month each. This is on top of our $250/month for HOA dues for water and insurance. $400 extra month for just utilities I had to admit really helps the budget. I can totally understand now how Mr Money Mustache talks about living frugally as a early retiree.

Anyway I had a great weekend and I'll post more later.

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