I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

Finally August Ends!

In many ways, I’d like summer to last forever. But not financially! Lots of budget overages including groceries and diapers to contend with this month. We still ended up spending less than we earned overall but it was not easy and only the fact that I made more contracting than is in our budget kept us from doing that. I had the good fortune to have an okay month in July contracting (I get paid the 15th of the following month). August was not so good, I earned about $200 less than normal so in September there will be no cushion for the budget to fall back on.

Here’s some pertinent data for August’s inflows and outflows:

Our total income was $3464.00 (that includes the $250 deductible we got returned finally)

Our total expenses were $3260.81 (including moving that $250 to savings)

A difference of: $373.19 (don’t get excited yet lol)

Of that $373.19, $221.11 is carried over to next month for irregular expenses, which leaves a surplus of $152.08. Yay!

This amount will be snowflaked to our Capital One card on September 7th, which is when my spouse gets his first September paycheck. There is this surplus because my own contracting income was ~$700 and the budget is based on my income being $500. So there isn’t always going to be that kind of buffer. In actuality it ends up that we are over budget by about $50.

Some overages included our groceries ($65.95 over), diapers ($13.72 over) and misc ($7.39 over, included my hosting fees for the next year). It seems instead of spending $75/week on groceries we spent much more like $91/week. Ugh.

Some “unders” which helped make up for the “overs” was gasoline for the cars ($23.79 under) and natural gas/electric ($23.30 under, don’t expect that next month!).

I did not hit my goal of $100 in alternative income. I snowflaked in alternative income a total of $44.06. I was very unmotivated about listing on craigslist this month and I’ve run out of textbooks worth anything. We are having a yard sale in September so hopefully we can bump that up.

Overall I am pleased we have money to snowflake. Not as much as I would have liked, but it is decent. On to September! Looking forward to snowflaking that $152.08 next week!

~J

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