October 2016: Our Money Went Where?

October, us such a great month. You have Halloween, the leaves change, and you start to get cooler temperatures outside as well. Now that the month is over, a lookback on our spending. Overall, it was up about $1200 compared to September due to some big ticket one off purchases, and our 6 month car insurance renewal coming due. What else happened in the SSC household this month? Let’s take a look!

Overall, our yearly spending is still projecting us to be just under $50k/year which is right in line with our assumptions. Woohoo! Also, October was the first month Mrs. SSC got a paycheck since leaving her job back in June or July or whenever she actually left. That’s how impactful it was to the budget, I don’t even remember which month it was, lol. Yeah for small things! Like everyone else with money in the markets, our overall investments are down ~1.5%, booo… Still on track to be FI by 2018 though, so that is excellent! Instead of comparing our October versus the year, this month we chose to show how October and September compared to each other since it was such a big jump in month to month spending.

September rocked! October.... Not so much
September rocked! October…. Not so much
Big Ticket Items

The biggest expense this month was renewing our auto insurance which is $715 every 6 months.

Haircuts ate up $56. Usually, they aren’t lined up like this, but since we were getting family photos done, and I was due for a haircut anyway it just happened we ALL got haircuts at the same time.

Family photos were $290. We finally found someone here that does a great job at photography – which is not as easy as you may think. We had somebody in LA that was awesome, but after moving it’s been a swing and a miss until this last go around. We like getting family pics done because it’s nice having us all in the pictures and we like having that record of the kids progressions that doesn’t just come from our phones.

We have a short weekend in Hill Country this weekend which was another $273. We figured it would be fun to get out of the routine with the kids and found a nice quiet cabin to go spend a couple nights at.

Daycare is up because of a 5 Monday month. Oh daycare, you cruel mistress you…

We renewed our Zoo membership for $124. It totally pays out for us as we usually go 1-2 times a month and the kids like seeing the animals. Since we go so often, we don’t feel obligated to see everything every time we go there, so it’s a great morning activity with our household.

Finally, $200 was to replenish Mrs. SSC’s “cash stash”, which is her mini ATM at the house. I rarely use cash for anything, but when I get below $20, I just ask about some cash, and voila, money appears. Hahahaha

 

Wins For the Month

Mrs. SSC made the kids costumes for the 3rd year in a row now, and she’s getting really good. We spent about $8 on felt and foam to put these together.

Bats! Vampire bats!
Bats! Vampire bats!

Our Christmas shopping gets a huge break this year, as we are doing White Elephant style gift exchange with the in-laws. We all felt like it would be more exciting and since we’re all adults, and typically just get what we want, when we want it, none of us felt that we really “needed” anything for Christmas. Win – Win all around.

Utilities are dropping off slightly due to the weather starting to cool down. We’re still in the 80’s with occasional forays into the 70’s, but the AC isn’t working nearly as hard these days.

We finally got a refund for the overcharging by ATT. We got billed for 2 months after we cancelled service and it took 2 rounds of calls each month to finally correct it. I should invoice them, sheesh that was annoying.

Summary

That’s about it for our spending update. Hopefully your October spending wasn’t quite as filled with one off’s as ours.

In regards to Christmas, do you do full present exchanges, no presents, or somewhere in between? We’ve also debated whether we should still get each other gifts or not? What do you guys think?

I still think we could let the kids pick out a gift for Mommy and Daddy at the least. Let us know your thoughts on that in the comments, I’d love to get some other opinions on the subject.