Tightwad Tuesday: Track Your Spending and Compete with Yourself!

In general, there are 2 buckets of expenses –

• Fixed expenses are the same amount each month that you generally have little to no control over, i.e., mortgage or rent, insurance premiums, etc.
• While Flexible expenses vary each month and you have some degree of impact on, i.e., food, fuel, entertainment, utilities, etc.

Our Expenses

As part of our efforts to watch our spending and try to decrease our outflow each month, I’ve been visiting my good friend, Mr. Spreadsheet, as I track our spending on certain ‘flexible’ categories.

In the Fixed category we have:

• Mortgage
• Adoption loan
• Homeowners Insurance (pay semi-annually, but budgeted monthly)
• Auto Insurance (pay semi-annually, but budgeted monthly)
• Home phone
• Wireless internet
• Trash removal

Our Flexible expenses include:

• Groceries/Food
• Water
• Electricity
• Cell phones (We are on pre-paid plans because we aren’t heavy users)
• Gas/Fuel
• Miscellaneous - Household items/Toiletries/Cleaning products/Everything else

Tracking Food and Fuel – Yikes!

I knew that food and fuel were our biggest budget busters each month, but putting it on paper and actually tracking what we’re spending is somewhat eye-opening.  I know we aren’t perfect, but dang, are we really that bad?  Yes, apparently we are.  It’s frightening.

I’m going to be totally transparent here and show you our spending on food and fuel for the month of May.

This is a big chunk of money each month and deserves some attention.  The grocery portion of our food spending isn't too bad - $302.47 for the month.  While I'm sure that can be improved some, we really need to cut down on eating out.  For the month of July, we’re challenging ourselves I’m challenging myself (because obviously I eat out more than he does and I’m the primary cook in our household) to get the restaurant total down to $100 or less.  We’re currently at $84. This will be a tough one to meet, but I’m determined to make it happen.  After we hit the $100 mark, I'd like to really dig in and try to get it down to $50 or less each month. 

In May, our fuel spend was pretty high, in part, because we bought gas for the lawnmower, tractor, weed eater, tiller, all that good stuff.  We’re trying to be more aware of miscellaneous driving and cutting out some of those restaurant trips should help.  We’d like to get our fuel spend below $450 this month.  We’re currently at $161.  I think this is achievable.

Charting Electricity Usage

Another bill I like to track, because I know our behavior can impact it, is the electric bill.  I got a little nerdy and created a chart to see the difference every month.  I’m comparing the dollar amount of the bill each month with last year’s bill.  I didn’t track January and February because we didn’t move into the new home until mid-February 2011. 

So far, we’ve seen a decrease each month, which keeps us motivated to continually watch our usage.  I’m a little concerned about next month’s bill because of all the triple-digit days we’ve had recently.   Once my clothesline is up, I should be able to impact the electric bill even more.  Our goal for this flexible expense is rather vague – we just want to see it decrease year over year each month.  A 10% difference would be great, but we’ll take anything.

What to do with the Savings

We’re hoping that by tracking these expenses and working to improve them each month, we’ll have additional funds to help pay down our adoption loan.  That’s our primary debt focus right now.  It’s at a good interest rate and we’re glad to have that option to help fund our adoption, but the sooner we can pay it off, the better.

These are just a couple ways we try to keep ourselves in check and make improvements in our spending. What monthly bills are you keeping a close eye on?  What are your goals with the savings you create? Any other nerd-y types out there with charts and graphs?