May Expenses

I know that it's been a little while since my last post. But I do have some updates. We tracked our expenses during the month of May and I loaded them into Excel and subtotals various categories. Ugh - a whack of expenses on stuff that is unnecessary. But here they are:

House (includes mortgage, property taxes, insurance, oil, and furnace lease) - $2,669
Lawn/Garden (includes soil, sods, and equipment to lay sod in back yard AND lawn maintenance) - $858
Bills (payments on credit cards) - $1009
Lunch/Dinner (lunches, dinners, and coffees) - $365
Groceries (food and toilettries bought at grocery store) - $1,076
Transportation (car payment, gas, and bus) - $815
Loans (student loans) - $430
Utilities (water, electricity, cable, internet, phone, and cell phone, etc.) - $386
Daycare - $600
Gifts - $140
Miscellaneous (includes clothing, lotto tickets, service charges, membership dues, alcohol, donations, toys, and "treats") - $671

This doesn't include $2,100 I paid for my recent work trip expenses.

It's hard to believe that we can be spending this much. There is certainly room for improvement. At least we now know where our money is going.

We've finished the sodding - Yahoo!!!

So, after 1+ weeks of hard work, working around a 1 year's old and full-time jobs' schedules, we have finished sodding our back yard. By doing it ourselves, it cost us around $675. That includes the sod, soil, a garden cart, shovel, rake, and tarps. Compared to $2000 that landscapers were quoting, we did pretty well in our spending. And it looks pretty good if I do say so myself. We still need to work on the garden areas but the sodding has been completed. Whew! And we are still going to buy a shed and some gravel to sit it on. That will be much more costly - probably around $1,200. But I'm selling some stock options to cover all costs so that it doesn't impact our existing debt. If that darn stock price would just go up again. :)

Credit Card Debt Update

So, I calculated our debt on the 1st of June and we've officially paid off $786 of our cc debt in May. That represents 6% of our debt. I'm pleased with our accomplishment for the month. There are still lots of areas for improvement but it's a good start. And now, with the transfer of the final balance to the 0% cc, there is only one cc to worry about paying on every month. And since it's not accumulating any interest each month, everything paid on it will go directly to principle. We can just focus on that one card.