So I skipped my August Recap. I guess I’d say I had a lot going on and, but that’s an excuse. I mentioned briefly on Facebook that a lot of it was shame, and that’s true too.
September was not much better for us though, which is a hard realization. While we had some major home expenses that derailed some of our retirement savings goals, our day-to-day expenses were still too high compared to what we want to be spending on those expenses. Sometimes I have a habit of saying, “we had visitors this month,” or “we traveled somewhere this month,” and these are all just really bad reasons to be out of budget. True, Eric was off almost the entire month of September, but that doesn’t mean we just get to spend all we want on restaurants and going out, because we plan to retire early, and we need to learn to stick to a budget when we’re not working to consume most of our time.
It’s interesting to me, because I’m a huge YNAB follower, and they say this all the time: there are no “normal” months, yet I keep making excuses as if next month will be “normal” and I will magically be able to eat all my meals at home. And of all lives, military families have the least chance of having a “normal” month, which is the subject for an entire post. So I need to embrace the variances, and understand that maybe my goals are unrealistic. While I’ve been able to patch and cover overspending with unexpected windfalls and extra hours, it’s not a good habit to be in. I need to stop overspending, and we need to be able to say no to ourselves, and not do things and figure it out later.
This month has also been a big step forward in our budget because we’ve officially made the switch to the New YNAB instead of YNAB Classic that I’ve been using for 4 years. This is a huge deal because one of the new features of New YNAB is that it removed the “red arrow,” allowing me to carry forward debt to ourselves in different categories (such as when I break my own rules and spend money we don’t have yet). Well, it was a wake-up call that I had been carrying a lot of red arrows, and our budget wasn’t as good as I thought it was.
So with new YNAB, we have an accurate picture of where our money is going right now, and what our current goals are. We’re on the same page again, which is really good, and it’s also great because I feel that I’ve been taking on this emotional burden of making the budget work through all the red arrows, and now we get to have a real budget where we say no when we are out of money.
I have to say, there is so much humility in posting about this publicly. But I don’t want to be disingenuous and say that we’re this perfect family who follows their budget but accidentally goes out to eat too much. We’re far from it. And here is my moment to catch my crashing budget and correct the path before we continue on to destruction. We have a moment to say, “hey, we’ve got some good concepts, but poor execution, how can we fix it?” and actually do it, so that’s what we’re trying to do.
I write these posts each month and say, “oh, in August, we are going to eat at home,” or “in July, we’re going to stick to our meal plan,” and on the tenth of the month, I’m back at my favourite restaurant for a $50 dinner with drinks, knowing that I have leftovers in the refrigerator. I had a real talk with Eric about our budget, not just the highlights, and we know we have some fixing to do. We spent a lot of cash savings on some big renovations for our new house, and they’re lower than we are comfortable with, and with that in mind, we reduced our contributions to retirement accounts going forward.
In August, we spent $588 on groceries, and $367 at restaurants. This was supposed to be a “no spend” month for us, buying only the essentials.
In September, we were back to horrible habits, and we spent $704 at restaurants and $440 on groceries. The grocery spending is a small victory to me, as that’s actually within my target budget (I’d like to be at $400 monthly, but $450 is okay to me). The restaurants are really unexplainable. Some small breakfast dates while the kiddo was at daycare. An entire weekend of going out because I didn’t want to grocery shop. Horrible habits.
These are usually the only expenses I discuss, because everything else seems to stay nearly in line. We did spend a lot in our day trips/family fun category attending a couple local fairs, but that is something I’ve just learned to budget more toward because it is important to us.
When it comes to saving, in September with our reduced contributions, we contributed $1357 to retirement accounts, which is still more than we will contribute in October and through the rest of the year while we build up our cash savings again. I received 3 paychecks, therefore 3 contributions, and we reduced TSP contributions to a lower amount, as September’s contribution reflects August’s deductions.
In August, we contributed $1630 to retirement accounts, which shows the beginning of the reduction in contributions.
I anticipate October contributions (excluding the 25% of Eric’s re-enlistment bonus) to be around $750, which is a drastic reduction for us, and cannot stay that way or we will not reach our early retirement goals with stability.
I know that this was a really long post for a budget recap, but I needed to get this out in the open to say that we’re not maintaining this perfect budget and that everyone needs to take a moment to make sure they’re on the right path.
