Today, I have spent about 3/4 of my time in my office, reviewing, reworking, rethinking and double checking all things in my financial plan.  Overall, this has been a good year for us financially and I want to make sure that we stay on a good course to keep things in a positive direction.

One thing that has significantly changed this year is our income. Matt started the year off on unemployment, actively seeking a position. This continued until mid-April with a period of six weeks where he had no income.   I worked between 10- 15 hours a week in Guam via Tiny Eye until the end of May. I was very surprised to learn that my contract was not renewed in June.  Although this has negative impacted our finances, I do not plan to seek a second job at this point. I have some things on the radar, but this would currently consist of less than 2 hours weekly. One of the things that I wanted to make sure of was that we would be able to continue our current lifestyle without building up debit if things stayed absolutely the same for an entire year.  Currently, we should be able to maintain both our current income and living status based on the numbers I have gotten today.

I was able to finalize a budget for 2023.  I did make some major changes in not only the way I am budgeting but also in the priorities that we have.  Although the way I am wording and paying our expenses in 2023 is different, we are still using a zero budget. Meaning that both Matt and my income is budgeted at 100% with no extra money.  We find ways to save more and make money in a variety of different ways. Part of my time was spent reviewing previous years and where we stand financially compared to even 2011.  We currently have 24 thousand dollars in debt besides our Tahoe and house.   This is in comparison to $16 thousand in December of 2015.   One important difference that should be noted with the current value of our house, we could in theory sell the house and be able to cover not only the remaining mortgage but also our current debt including the Tahoe.  Another comparison that I found is that our minimum credit card payment in 2017 was $989.69 compared to $822 today.  I am going to continue to work toward zero debit other than the mortgage, but I also want to celebrate the success that we are achieving while actively living and engaging in our lives.

Speaking of success, we have achieved a “baby” emergency fund of $1000.  The majority of this is in cash so that is a HUGE success.  The next steps that I am going to focus on under the Dave Ramsey plan is snowballing all debit.  I am seriously considering making zero credit card debit a goal for 2023!  I am not sure this is achievable with Lily starting college, but I do want to have less than $100 thousand in debit including our mortgage and Tahoe by 2024.  Currently we have around $170 thousand in total debit.

We averaged $972 a month in grocery spending this year. In comparison to the USDA “thrifty” plan which would equal $1400 a month. This is significant increase in spending when compared to $530 in 2021, $631 in 2020 and even $821 in 2011.  My mother continues to provide support in this area as she eats at least 3 days a week with us.  My goal is to increase grocery spending to $975 a month in 2023.

We have spent an average of $620 a month on gas this year. This does include 2 trips to Florida, two trips to Mrytle Beach and a trip to Asheville. My plan is to budget $600 a month for gas with anything extra being used to pay down debt or for the extra expenses like oil change that always seem to pop up.

One final thing that I am going to include but it is an after note and one that I just wanted to document somewhere is that we lost around $2500 this year.  This was not an intentional lost or one we could have predicted but it did happen and affected our bottom line!