November 2016 Financial Update

October was a crazy month… Lots going on and so it flew by while I struggled to keep up with life… As such, the blog fell to the side and I only published a few posts.  But, here we are in a new month, so time for another financial update.

October Spending

After successfully bringing our spending down in September, we have come back up again for October.  The goal is to be below the average from last year of $7700, but October came in at $8300… This total includes our mortgage, utilities and normal monthly costs, but didn’t count special spending that we saved up for (planned spending as I call it).

Because of the mortgage renewal process that we are finishing up right now, we had some one time expenses related to the mortgage, so that category is up a bit from normal… That of course will level out again for another 5 years of consistent payments after this month.  The other category that was crazy high was our food & drink spending.  Lots of eating out… Bad us!  Hopefully we can bring November down because you know December is always an expensive month.

Last year, October was a very frugal month for us.  We came in just over $6100.  To be fair, though, I was away for work a lot of October 2015, so this year we are both home and we now have a puppy… In any case, I am not impressed with our total for this month.

And now for a quick recap of my finance-related goals for 2016:

Goal #3 – Emergency Fund

We are sitting at $9400 for the emergency fund now, so only $600 left to go.  Almost there!

Goal #4 – Save for Planned Spending

I think all of our major travel for the year is done.  I have a bunch of work trips in the next little while before the end of the year, but those are paid for by work.  We might go on a weekend here or there… Maybe skiing, but nothing major, so the travel portion of our planned saving/spending is done.  We have just under $1000 left in our travel fund, so we will save that for some trips coming up next year.

As I mentioned last update, we got the exterior of the house painted, so that payment finally came out of the home reno fund.  And I also hinted last update that we had a new plan for financing our home reno plans, which I was going to write and post about, but well that hasn’t happened yet… so you’ll just have to wait… Hopefully I can get some time to get that done next week.  But, there is still $6500 left in our home reno fund, so I believe the reno fund is fully funded according to my original goals for 2016.  I guess I can call this goal complete now!

Goal #5 – Net Worth & Retirement Savings

Some down markets and lots of spending means no increase in net worth… In fact we are down.  But because of that decrease, we are closer to the distribution that I had put as my goal.  So even if the total isn’t quite there, that’s something, right?  Yeah, I know… it’s not anything… We are still up almost 9% from the beginning of the year, but my goal was an increase of 1% per month, so 2 months to
get it up 3% to where I want it to be…

 

Goal #6 – Mortgage Renewal & Account Consolidation

This is now almost completely done.  A couple small pieces to clean up this week and then hopefully I will be able to put together a summary post that explains what we did and how everything went.  Yay!

Sorry for the lack-luster post… How did your October go financially? 

 

 

 

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