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Hope’s Actual Spending and Income – Week of 8/31

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You can see last week’s actual spending and income report here. This was a good week. I know the table looks like we ended up in the red, but in actuality, we are mostly living on last month’s income so there is a buffer behind the scenes.

Because I brought in about $700 (before taxes) more than I anticipated, I went ahead and paid some additional monthly bills and made some debt payments. Right now, I am not really sticking to focusing on any particular debt, it’s more whatever strikes me. Yes, I know that’s not the best plan. I need to focus on a new plan soon. Maybe after my next debt update.

Actual Spending and Income from this Past Week

Without further ado, here’s how our finances looked this week. Bear in mind that these numbers are after taxes and without business expenses. The BOLD items are items that were either not anticipated for this or I was off in my planning.

Actual Spending - Week of 8/31

DescriptionAnticipatedActual
Income *after taxes$1235$1706
Gymnastics($100)($62)
Rent($650)($650)
Reimburse Grandmama($16)($16)
Life Insurance *quarterly payment($67)($67)
Utilities - Gas, Water & Trash($92)($92)
Utilities - Electric($170)($170)
Gas($40)($20)
History Buff *loan replayment$50$50
Cost of Girdle for football($25)
Amazon($158)
Utilities - Internet($61)
Tax Debt($500)

Total$150($64)

Spending Notes

There are just a few things to note:

  1. Gymnast is actually going to continue with both football and gymnastics. The football team does not practice one day per week AND the season ends in less than a month. He will continue going to gym 1x per week. My monthly fee was offset by selling part of his competition uniform this past week. Right now, he will not return to competition this season.
  2. Gas was 1/2 the normal cost this week since we are really not driving much at all. Other than 1 trip to gym, everywhere we go in less than 5 miles from the house. Woohoo! Not to mention, Sea Cadet is driving himself again.
  3. My Amazon Prime membership renewed and I hadn’t checked into the discount BAD readers had told me about. We use Prime all the time, but it charged to my old Amazon account (paid off 11/2017) which remains open but no balance is carried. So I wanted to get it paid off ASAP. (There were a couple of things purchased by the kids/grandmother which were on this bill, they paid for all of those earlier.)
  4. Internet – on my taxes, I split this cost between business since I work from home 100% of the time and personal since we do all use it for leisure and schooling. But figured I would put it here rather than keeping it out in business expenses. Thoughts?
  5. Tax Debt – the monthly payment on this debt is $246, due at the end of the month. I wanted to get ahead and I’m thinking this may be my next target. But we can discuss another time. But I really just went with my gut with my extra income and decided to get ahead a bit. This pushes my due date to the end of November and drops by balance below $4,000. Yeah!

 


7 Comments

  • Reply Angie |

    Amazon has pretty awesome customer service. I bet you could email them and have them reduce to the rate you qualify for and get refunded the difference. If not, you can cancel your Prime service and get a prorated refund. Then signup for the new discounted service. It’s worth a shot!

    Great job getting ahead on some bills. Things seem to be falling in place. You must be ecstatic to not be in the car for hours every day!

    • Reply Hope |

      Thanks, Angie, I will try that! Would be nice to get some of this cost back.

      But I am very grateful that I was just able to pay it off and not accumulate any new debt/interest. That in and of itself is a big win for me. And yes, the break from driving has been really nice. But I sure do miss his passion for his sport. But I imagine that is as much due to teenage-hood versus the life changes we are going through.

  • Reply Laura |

    You had homecoming as an anticipated expense, but I don’t see it here. Did you not pay anything towards that this week?

    • Reply Hope |

      The actual expenses are listed 10 days after the anticipated spending. So the actual cost will be published on 9/17. I know it’s confusing…I publish the anticipated spending on Friday, and then post the actual numbers 10 days later.

      So these numbers are actually accounting for the plan published on 8/31. Make sense?

  • Reply Louise |

    If your business expenses are not included here, where are they included? Have they come out of your income figures already? Or do you need to pay them out of your leftover balance?

  • Reply Mia |

    Hope, do you have any expected and necessary annual expense savings accounts yet? Pretty sure you’ve mentioned saving, but my memory isn’t clear. I know that you’re in debt payment mode at the moment but one thing we did while in that mode was fund yearly accounts so that we’d be less likely to be caught unaware. It started for us after getting an unexpected bonus – yay! more towards debt… or, what if instead, this time we planned ahead for auto tags, home owner taxes, school clothes, etc, and thus had a higher monthly income to go for debt? Eventually we gave each account a one time influx of ‘found’ money and then began monthly funding. We figured out how to make it work for us with just a little trial and error.

    I especially love our birthday and Holiday accounts because I can actually save $ by shopping deals all year round. I’m a planner and knowing we can cover basics means a lot of peace for me. My husband thinks it really helps keep us budget focused over the course of a year.

    It must have felt awesome to be able to slap that Amazon bill right out! A great natural high lol.

So, what do you think ?