Engineer Seeking FIREDisclosure: This post might contain affiliate links. If you click through and make a purchase, I’ll earn a commission, at no additional cost to you. Read my full disclosure here.
Our stay-at-home journey continues. We’re still doing all our shopping online and avoiding meeting with other families. However, we started going out to parks so that the children can play outside and avoid feeling isolated at home. Fortunately, all the people, whom we meet outside prefer to keep their distances.
Our expenses this month were $5.6k, which is much lower than our average. This is probably the only positive change in our lives that has been caused by COVID-19.
Observations
- Lowest monthly expenses since we started tracking: $5.6k
- This biggest change compared to other months is that we’re still not paying for daycare
- Our online expenses (groceries and shopping) are now 40% of our expenses
- The actual amount that we are paying for these categories hasn’t changed much. However, instead of going to the stores, we now buy everything online
- I’m very grateful that the online infrastructure is in such great shape that they can accommodate this huge spike in demand. Specifically, since Amazon’s retail supply chain was not devastated by a global pandemic, I really can’t see anything that will cause it to fail.
- Our expenses would have been even lower if we didn’t have to pay for our annual HOA fees ($410)
Detailed breakdown
| Category | Expenses | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| Mortgage | $2,658 | This is a 15-year mortgage @3% |
| Shopping | $1,062 | 70% at Amazon, rest is clothing and books from online stores |
| Groceries | $1,048 | 60% from Costco, 40% from Kroger. All of them online |
| HOA fees | $410 | Annual cost |
| Utilities | $264 | Electricity ($200), internet, alarm |
| Cell phone | $64 | Received some kickback for not using lots of data |
| Gas | $36 | Much less consumption than pre-COVID |
| Tolls | $30 | |
| Restaurants | $30 | Take-out from a local business |
How to easily track your monthly expenses
This is the methodology that I use to monitor my monthly expenses. You can also do the same:
- Create a free online account at Personal Capital
- Link your accounts, so that you can track them in the Personal Capital dashboard
- Bank accounts
- Retirement accounts (401k, IRA, etc)
- Credit cards
- Investment accounts
- At the end of each month, view the list of your Expenses (also found if you go to Banking -> Cash Flow -> Expense)
- Go through each line one by one
- Check if the “Category” of the expense is correct. If not, then move it to the correct category. You can also create your own categories
- When you are done, you can view the graphs with the aggregate data and compare your expenses with last month
Any suggestions?
About Me
My Newsletter
What about car insurance?
I pay car insurance in full as a lump sum every 6 months. It gives me a nice discount compared to the monthly payments
[…] what other people has done: https://engineerseekingfire.com/may-2020-expense-report/ […]
You’re doing way better than us with your gas spending! Granted, we’d probably be closer to your level if my husband didn’t go on all those joyrides in his classic muscle car. But I guess it’s worth it since it gives him so much happiness.
Well, you know what they say “Happy wife, happy life” 🙂 In your case it’s probably “Happy Husband, FI well planned” 🙂 (ok, I just made that up 🙂 )