The State of the Life Address (January 2019)

Part of my effort to better myself this year was to keep an honest record of the things that I wanted to improve upon. 

First off – Income vs Spending

Almost 94% of our income, we spend.  This sounds bad and it is but the picture gets slightly better when you consider that we’re aggressively paying down debt.  If you factor that out, we spend about 80% of what we make.

What are we spending our money on?

7 % Car

2% Entertainment

5% Fashion & Leisure

22% Food

9% Home Goods

36% Monthly Bills

5% Pets

6% Wellness

7% Education

1% Investments             

These categories break down by various strata but there are a few things I want to point out.

24% of the Car expense was on rare service and maintenance charges

40% of the Fashion & Leisure was on Dana’s hair and the rest was mostly for my Rodeo costume

73% of the Home Goods was for rare Home Improvement items

33% of the Food budges was Restaurants (this is terrible)

36% of the Monthly Bills was for Credit Card Payments

And 100% of the education was for YAGP and Summer Intensive related charges.

Only time will tell but I don’t foresee most of these charges as being repeatable.  Hopefully, in the overall trend, January 2019 will be a month where we had a lot of extraneous expenses that could be easily avoided during any other time of the year.  The restaurants charge is the one that sticks out to me more than any other for which we should all be ashamed.  That was 7% of our overall spending and should be much less. 

Excluding the credit card expense (which I don’t see going away any time soon) these extra expenses comprised 24% of our overall spending.  So we could potentially get an overall gain of that amount in our monthly budget to either save or send to the credit card.  This is why I’m going through this exercise.  To identify weaknesses.

As for the diet:

There were 23 days out of 30 so far where I exceeded my daily calorie budget.  This budget is very restricted so, narrowing it down to show days where I was above 2000 calories, I get 17.  I failed to track on 5 of those days so they get counted as days above as I’m sure that they were.  As of today I’ve lost just shy of 2 pounds.

There’s a lot of room for improvement in the diet category and, as always most of these bad calories come from having a drink or 2 at night to get to sleep.  On days where I didn’t do this, I was well below even my restricted calorie goal.

Still, overall I’m doing better with drinking empty calories.  As of the beginning of the year, there was nowhere for me to go but up in that respect, and I have made iterative improvements.  I’m not happy with where I’m at but I am satisfied that I’ve done better.

While I can’t say I’m happy with the results from January, I can say that I’m optimistic in that I see a lot of room for improvement.  My goal was to do this for a month and see what I discovered but now I can say that I definitely plan to continue.  I want to see if we can do better and measure the steps that we take to get there.

Not much to say about yesterday except that I did what I said I was going to do.  I cleaned the house and played my video game until it was time to pick up the kiddo from dance.  In fact, I pretty much finished it.  I’m on some kind of epilogue now but the main storyline is finished.  This makes me kind of sad as it was a very fun experience and I hate for it to be over.

Today I’ve got to make a choice between cleaning the house and getting a haircut.  I put both on my list but there won’t be time enough to get to each of them.  I should probably get a haircut but I do like to have a clean house as well and that would help the family during what is already going to be a hectic and stressful Friday.

I can pretty much guaranty that we will be starting off February behind with regards to Restaurant expenses due to having YAGP this weekend.  I’m sending the kid all of my luck.