November was a great, yet weird month for us. We decided to become debt free, experienced some car trouble and my income was low. But, somehow we still made it out of November without going into the red.
I did a recap on YouTube if you’re an audiovisual person as well.
At the beginning of the month, we took out $6k from our savings and paid off DJ’s last student loan to become debt free! The debt payoff moment was very anticlimactic due to us already having the money in our savings for well over a year. We’ll talk more about that in a separate post.
Not having that debt on our net worth tracker IS wonderful though!
Okay, let’s talk about our spending 🙂 (All screenshots are taken from our new budgeting spreadsheets)
Fixed Expenses
Budgeted: $3039.15 | Actual: $3031.63
We did well in every category except for electricity. This was actually our fault because we didn’t change the budgeted amount to reflect our previous bill amounts.
Variable Expenses
Budgeted: $1232.16 | Actual: $1676.29
Well, that difference column sure looks crazy.
Let’s break down the categories:
- Groceries – We bought groceries on the last day of November and decided against putting the purchase towards December’s numbers. 🤷🏽♀️
- Home Expenses – We bought our baby cousin a lot of clothes and also picked up a few Christmas decorations for our house.
- Leisure – No explanation. Just spending time with each other lol.
- Mrs Allowance – I got my Christmas sweater, some makeup (because I have none), a new puzzle and more baby clothes.
- Mr Allowance – DJ ate and drank his entire allowance! 🤦🏽♂️
Savings
Budgeted: $585.06 | Actual: $1885.06
Same ol’, same ol’ savings-wise for this month. I didn’t make much so I didn’t add anything to my Roth IRA. I did add $1,300 to our joint savings from money I had sitting in my checking account though.
Debt
Budgeted: $200 | Actual: $6,009
We decided to finally pay off the rest of DJ’s last student loan so now we’re officially debt free!!!
Final Thoughts
So, that was our November!
I still can’t believe that we are at a point where we can actually handle budget overages and still survive. This is what living below your means looks like. We never would have been able to live on DJ’s income if we didn’t reduce our expenses, change our behavior and eliminate debt.
Check out our Instagram page to see what we’re budgeting for in December.
Happy Holidays!
— Dannie
Great job with lowered Cable Bill costs. Lots of people still paying large price tags on those Cable TV packages. Interesting Car Insurance Rate, pretty darn low. Curious how you got it below $150?!
Best,
Todd
Thanks! Hulu is super cheap and we get Netflix for free since we have T-Mobiile. Our car insurance is pretty cheap but that’s because we shopped around a bit.
We have two cars, one is a 2007 and the other is a 2016. The 2007 essentially has just the basic things covered and the 2016 has more, but the combined price comes out pretty low still.
We played around a lot on their website because it has a calulator that updates everytime you make changes. We just kept making changes until we were satisfied! – DJ