Miscellaneous Budget In Danger (already)

It's not even halfway through the month and our miscellaneous budget is in danger.

Miscellaneous Budget in Danger

The remaining amount will be enough to fill up my gas tank at least one more time and I already know that I need to fill up at least 3 more times before January is over.

I will analyze every single miscellaneous transaction to see where all our money is going. This is one of the main reasons to have a budget, to see where all your money is going and to make changes if necessary.

Miscellaneous Budget for January so far.

After analyzing every single transaction for the month of January, there were two transactions that were quite large and out of the ordinary. As mentioned in a previous post, my wife and her older sister threw a baby shower for their oldest sister.

• $338.75 total cost of baby shower
• $47.88 cost for Chinese takeout dinner

As you can see the transaction highlighted in red, the total cost of the baby shower was $338.75 which was offset by $170 splitting it with her sister. The other transaction highlighted in red was for Chinese takeout we ordered for dinner on Friday when her sister came down from Boston for the baby shower and my in-laws were over for dinner as well. The $30.00 deposit highlighted in green was because my wife forgot to use the money from our grocery budget cash envelope and used our debit card instead. So I took that amount and re-applied it to our miscellaneous budget. So, if we didn't have these two out of the ordinary transactions, we should have spent $279.94 with $265.06 remaining, which is about half our miscellaneous budget left for the month with a couple days left until we reach the half way mark of January.

By having this budget, I am able to see that a lot of the normal transactions are for when I buy breakfast and lunch at work. So adding up all the costs, I've spent a total of $40.56 so far, and just by estimating, If I were to continue to purchase breakfast and lunch every day, I'd be spending around $100.00 or more and that perhaps that money can be used to pay down debt further. Going forward, I'm going to try and eat breakfast at home and bring in lunch as much as possible. 

I was hoping to avoid the interest charge on January 7th buy paying off my credit card in full.  But I couldn't pay it off until the 10th when my bonus was direct deposited into my checking account. Oh well, at least we have a $0.00 balance on our credit card and won't be using it anymore.

The other transactions from CVS and Target are for diapers and other small baby items we needed.

My wife and I discussed stopping her contributions to her 403(b) for now. Her employer doesn't match where as my company matches 75% up to the first 6% and even offers us a free pension! So with the extra money of $400 per month, we're going to bump up our miscellaneous budget by another $100 and use the remainder to add to our debt snowball so that we can possibly pay off the student loan and car payment under 2 years. Once that's done, the next step I would like to approach is either, invest 15% of our total income to different retirement accounts and fund our children's education accounts, or, just continue with the debt snowball method and pay off our mortgage so that we can be completely debt-free by 2021. For now, I'll keep my eye on the short-term goal of paying off the student loan and car.

There are a lot of things and thoughts going around being it is only day 13 into becoming debt-free. I need to focus one day at a time so that I don't suffer debt fatigue so that we can continue our journey to zero debt.