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Tracking My Monthly Spending – October

Last month I posted my monthly expenses for the first time. I want to post my monthly expenses to force myself to understand just how high my expenses are. October was a very interesting month with all of my work traveling. When I travel for work, all of my food is expensed. Whenever I have a rental car the gas is expensed, however, when I use my own car, I don’t get to expense my gas. Instead, I get reimbursed $0.58 for every mile I drive, which is supposed to cover all car expenses.

My expenses for October are as follows:

October_Expenses

  • Home (+0.0%) – consists of my mortgage payment, association fees (water, trash removal, heat, gas, etc), electricity, cable/internet and condo insurance. Some of these expenses fluctuate monthly, but not enough for me to bother tracking.
  • Car (+5.4%) – consists of my car payment, auto insurance and gas. I ended up spending more on gas in October because of my trip to Indianapolis. I drove down in my own car and will be reimbursed. Basically I filled up three times instead of twice. I have less than a year remaining of car payments. When I complete my car payments this category will drop by more than half. I’d also like to change my car insurance and drop that payment.
  • Food (-48.6%) – consists of groceries and going out to lunch during work. My groceries will fluctuate a lot from month to month. I don’t go to the grocery store consistently and I tend to buy food that doesn’t expire quickly. This month I only went twice and one of the times was for only $12. Also, with all of my traveling I was able to expense a lot of my food for the month.
  • Luxuries (+0.0%) – consists of my netflix and zune subscriptions.
  • Phone (+0.0%) – consists of my cell phone. There are some minor fluctuations in the monthly bill for my phone, but not enough for me to bother tracking.
  • Free Money – I was able to push my free money up over $1,000 in October, which is good because I bought just about that much in blinds and furniture for my condo. I also spent nearly $1,000 for about three months of physical therapy that will help me run pain free.

I don’t know how boring it is for you all to read about my expenses, but I find it a very useful exercise. I recommend doing some sort of expense monitoring if you don’t do a formal budget.

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Posted in Monthly Expenses.