January & February Budget Update

If you haven’t heard by now, we’ve had kind of a rough January.  I lost my job, the Big Guy went out of town for 2 weeks, and then I found a temporary job.

Suffice to say that a bunch of stuff is up in the air right now.

And our budget really reflected that, as you’ll see below.  One of the big changes we made was moving the emphasis (at least in the first few months of the year) off of paying off debt ahead of time, and getting ahead on bills.  As a result, you’re going to see a lot of double payments.  And don’t worry, even though it looks like we went over budget, the excess was more than covered by our excess in previous months.

Here’s where our budget landed in January:

Wins:

We had a lot of wins this month, so I’m only going to hit on the the big ones!

• Income: Yep, our income was higher than expected, even though I was jobless for the first 2 weeks of the month.  I guess that’s what happens when The Big Guy goes to training.  Also, Blog income was fairly high (remember, in my Blog Income reports give the income I earned, and these budget updates give the income I actually received)
• Some of the payments are highlighted in green, even though they are way higher than what we budgeted for.  Why?  Because we doubled up on some of our biggest payments since we didn’t necessarily know where our paychecks would be coming from.
• Found Income:  We managed to come up with more than $500 in found income – that includes stuff The Big Guy did working for his dad, some babysitting money, and some referral checks from Bestmark.  Whopee!
• Gas: I just need to celebrate for a moment because this is the lowest our gas spending has EVER been…..

Losses:

• Groceries: yeah, we were high…..story of my life
• Gremlins: I stole Cat’s budget category “gremlins” for unexpected expenses, like repairs on our paid for vehicle.  That’s going to happen, so we just have to roll with it, right?
• Blog Income Taxes: Those are killer, aren’t they?

Other than that, we had a pretty successful January, all things considered and we even managed to get ahead on some of our bills!

$30,000 in 2015 –

So, as you hopefully know, we’re shooting to pay off $30,000 of debt in 2015.  It’s an ambitious goal, but we figure if we shoot for the moon, maybe we’ll land among the stars.  Cliche, right?  Seriously, though, it’s true!  So, without further ado, here is our debt payoff tally:

• January 2015: $2,718
• Total 2015; $2,718

This is way higher than most months will be, but that is due to two things.  One, we made several double payments in January (as seen in the budget above) and because we were able to file our taxes, we realized we had a surplus of $1,200 in the blog’s tax account, so we were able to put all of that towards our credit card debt.  How that for starting 2015 off with a bang?

And here’s how our February budget is shaping up:

We’re hoping that things start to even out this month – not so much on the crazy expenses like car repairs and such, but just that we know they’re coming and understand that we have to pay for this stuff rather than pay off debt. We can be grateful, because we’re not digging ourselves into more debt!

What do you think of our January Budget?

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