It takes a little bit of guts to share your income and expenses openly with the world. That said, I think there is value for both of us in reading this post. I will do a similar post every month.
Listed below is a detailed display of all income and expenses for the month of June 2016. This month was crazy and not normal in many ways. See what you think!
This was quite an interesting month. Some would say fantastic from the numbers above, but to be honest there are a lot of anomalies that make it look much better than it actually was. TRUST ME when I say it is not normally like this. Unfortunately.
Since this is my first Income/Expenses post, I am still working through how I want to display this data, but I tend to like Mint, which I'm working through how that then translates to my blog. Let's get into some details to see why this month was not the norm:
Income:
1) Income was very high because I randomly received an escrow overage check due to a recent refinance we did a few months ago. I didn't even expect this, and don't expect any massive bump like that again, but it was great to receive $2200 'randomly'!!
2) The 'Lending Club sales' should maybe be explained: I am unwinding my Lending Club investment as quickly as I can. So whenever I get "cash available to withdraw" from that account, I transfer it and count it as 'income.' This number will eventually get smaller and smaller and run out, but I can only get small amounts back as the loans are repaid, and it's great to get!
3) Dividends were great! Rental Income was terrible/negative!..As explained in my June Report here...but not a bad month at all.
Expenses:
1) Expenses were mostly in check this month, but again I benefited because I did not have a mortgage payment due to the refinance mentioned above. Hence, "home" was only $60 for my HOA. So this was another huge benefit this month that when coupled with the escrow check in 'income' made it fantastic!
2) There were some other random events on the expenses side, and I am still deciding with exactly how much detail I should categorize these items. But overall, about an average month on the expenses side, all things considered.
In summary, I managed to have a positive difference of ~$6000 this month. Incredible! Unfortunately I have family debt and some credit card debt still (details here, in Goals), so I definitely didn't "feel" the extra $6k. It went straight to paying down those items.
What do you think? I'd love to hear your thoughts below.
Thanks for reading!
Passive Income Dude
PID,
ReplyDeleteNice job - anything over 50% is just awesome. I see your utilities are fairly high, is this because of electricity? Is there something you can do within your utilities to save more or is this fairly consistent? Great job and keep on saving!
-Lanny
Dividend Diplomats, Thanks for the comment! 50% was awesome, but totally unexpected and more a one time thing I think. We'll see.
ReplyDeleteAs to your note about utilities, I need to do a better job at displaying this data. That category "bills and utilities" covers our utilities and our cell phone bill. So that reduces it by about $170 or so, and think it is probably more in line with what you'd expect. I'll break the data out better next month. Great catch though! I was just saying to my wife today that our Utilities are too high, so seeing this comment gave us a good laugh! Keep in touch,
I group my cell phone plan in utilities as well. So $200 was always there every month. I don't know how else to categorize it so I leave mine there. Glad you are making the choice of paying down your debt. Unless you get some of that negative debt where they pay you ;-)
DeleteCheers,
DFG
DFG,
DeleteHa! I would love to start offering some negative yielding debt to people! That's a great idea. :) This month was pretty weird for income/expenses so I'm kind of sorry to have started on this month, but that's when the site was created. We're frugal, but not to the extreme I don't think. Next month should be different. I'd be curious to hear what your monthly savings rate is. :) Cheers,