Monthly Expenses: August

It’s time, yet again, to update my monthly expenses and give you an intimate look in to this ninja’s spending habits. Most categories were relatively unchanged, except for some exciting blog income and a hell of a lot of cash thrown at my student loan. Read on for all the juicy details…

Explanation of Income:

Salary: My take home pay from the day job. I get paid every two weeks, so this usually doesn’t fluctuate too much. It was about $708 higher than it normally is, because I had some overtime work that I got paid for. Not to mention I had my first ever blogging income! Pulled in $230 blogging bucks last month. Me likey that income very much 🙂

Tutoring: I like to tutor people that are stupider than me in math and science. It also pays pretty well ($40/hr). The only bummer is only one of my tutoring kids started school in August so I walked away with a pathetic $80. My best tutoring month has been about $1,200.

Explanation of Expenses:

Auto: Any maintenance and fuel costs associated with my car, excluding car insurance. I fill my car up about once a month, so that’s why my bill is only $39. If you don’t have a company vehicle, I highly suggest you demand one from your employer. They are quite convenient.

Dining: I like to keep my dining bill under $100 each month, so the $80 I spent is about average. I try to take girlfriend ninja out to dinner about once a week on a fun little date.

Groceries: My goal is to keep my dining and grocery expenses at about $250 each month. Droppin’ $149 at the grocery store plus $80 on dining, keeps me well under my $250 food goal. Don’t really know why I was so far under budget in this category. I swear I’m not anorexic.

Insurance: Includes car and renters insurance. Sometimes I just want someone to steal something from my apartment so that I can actually use my renters insurance and feel like I’m gettin’ my money’s worth. I crashed my car two years ago and definitely got my monies worth in that accident… oops.

Interest expense: This is my school loan . I have a monthly obligation of $220. I say screw the minimum monthly payment and I have decided to increase my payments to basically every extra penny I have. No more putting it in my online savings account. I was able to put down $2K on that whore last month, which is nearly ten times more than my requirement!

Household: AI decided to put the external hard drive I purchased last month in my household category, mainly because I didn’t know where else to put it. I also spent $40 at Target apparently, but I can’t for the life of me recall what I bought. Perhaps $40 worth of paper towels that I forgot about?

The other categories were too unimportant or self explanatory so that is why I didn’t cover them. The overall total at the bottom is the cash I had leftover after all my expenses. I brought home a whoppin’ $65 in discretionary income last month. Primarily because I have declared war on my student loan. I’m use to having $1,000 to $2,000 left over, so I am slowly adjusting to “spending every dollar I make” and not having the surplus to grow my savings each month. Oh well, life goes on.

* Are you wondering why I post the previous month’s expenses a couple weeks late? I use quicken to track my spending and I have to wait until the end of the billing cycle before I can download these transactions. I know I could manually add each expense as it comes, but I am entirely too lazy for that. Thanks for checking in and if you got any comments, tips, or advice I’d be more than happy to hear it. *