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Welcome to our third Personal Finance Report. We are entering into another month which is giving us even more of a chance to improve our Financial Freedom! It is now time to look back on April and see the progress that we have made in our financial lives.
In our Financial Progress reports, you can expect to see an outline of our debt, savings, expenses, and income. We will also include a small snippet of what we did or what we need to do to improve each area. As time goes on, you can expect these progress reports to evolve and improve as we learn more about taking control of our money.
Budget Update
For the last two years, we have been using Dave Ramsey’s Everydollar website to budget our monthly expenses. We love how simple the website allows us to build our zero-dollar budget, but it is not providing us with everything we need. Last month we expressed the decision to change our budgeting tool. We did get an account activated with Mint and got all of our accounts linked.
It has been nice to have all of our balances in one place and we love that the balances update automatically. However, we have been experiencing some discouragement with the budget side of Mint. While Mint records our transactions automatically, we have to go in and move them to the correct categories. We are having to do this because Mint is not categorizing our spending correctly. It has almost been easier to manually enter in each transaction into Everydollar because we can also split each transaction between different categories if needed. We are still working on building up our budget and getting our categories the way we like it in Mint. In the meantime, we are still using Everydollar.
A major difference in April is that we broke down our categories even more in our budget. This has allowed us to have a better overall picture of our spending habits. These new categories will be used in April’s Financial Progress.
Debt
March Total Debt: $129,933.97
April Total Debt: $129,425.55
Credit Card Debt: $19,038.08
Car Loan: $641.15
Student Loans: $109,746.32
At the beginning of April, we had entered the month with $19, 325.45 in credit card debt and $862.20 in a car loan. We were able to use the debt snowball method and a portion of the money I earned through extra income to pay off our next smallest credit card balance of $270.76.
By the end of April, we were able to pay off a total of $287.37 in Credit Card Debt. This amount of progress is considerably smaller than March’s progress. Nonetheless, we are moving forward with paying down debt and not backward. Again, our car loan balance also decreased just by making the regular monthly payment. We are excited to see the small victories for the month of April.
Savings
March Total Savings: $3,839.45
April Total Savings: $3,960.74
Emergency Fund: $1,131.68
Maternity Leave: $2,500
C’s Retirement Fund: $329.06
As we mentioned in March, most of our focus was paying down debt and that focus continued in April. One of our goals in April was to begin automating our savings each month. We were successful with this goal as we increased our savings by $100 for the month of April. Overall, for the month of April, we had an increase in savings towards our Emergency Fund and my Retirement Fund. We plan to continue this trend in May.
Expenses
Total Expenses: Largest Spending Categories
Debt: 35%
Food: 16%
Utilities: 11%
Housing: 9%
In the month of April, we altered our classification categories within our budget. We went from having 9 categories to explain our spending to 17 different categories. This has dramatically changed the percentages that we see in our spending categories and has allowed us to reevaluate our spending. Our Debt is still our largest spending category with food coming in second. Our goal for April was to decrease our food budget to 15%. This goal was somewhat successful as we were able to decrease it from 18% to 16%. While we would like to decrease this just a bit more, we are proud of the progress we made in cutting our food budget for April.
In March, our housing category was comprised of our rent and housing utilities. However, we decided to break these up into different categories. In March our housing expenses made up 22% of our budget. This decreased in April to 20% if you add our utilities and housing categories together. This decrease was due to the weather improving outside and lowering our need to heat our home as much.
In the month of May, we are hoping to continue increasing our savings and cutting down on our debt. We will like to also decrease our food budget as we will be needing to increase our Kids budget to prepare for baby’s arrival in June. We believe that this will be very much doable with both my SO and me working.
Income
March Total Extra Income: $83.30
April Total Extra Income: $89.70
I had the same amount of success this month in earning additional income. I am still amazed by the amount of cash back that I had earned through Ibotta. Again this amount was earned purely from normal shopping and nothing earned from referrals. I still strongly believe that the bigger your team the more you can earn bonuses through Ibotta. I invite you to join my team here and you can earn $10 within your first month. We can all be winners together! I was also amazed at how much I was able to earn through online surveys. Most of this was earned through Swagbucks and their Discovery and Web Browsing reward sections. I highly recommend them as I have learned about new products in the last couple months. If you join Swagbucks, please use my code to begin earning right away here!
Ibotta: $25.70
Mystery Shopping: $28.00
User testing: $10.00
Online Surveys: $26.00
Misc: $0.00
Overall, I am pleased with our progress towards Financial Freedom in April. I have definitely found that starting this blog and joining different blogging communities has kept me motivated and staying accountable to my goals. Our family still has a long journey towards Financial Freedom, but I am confident that we will reach that moment in our lives. As we approach our second daughter’s arrival, I am concerned about the unpredictability of certain expenses. However, I remind myself that we are entering this journey of our lives far more prepared than when we had our first daughter. That within itself is a victory!
Previous Financial Progress Reports:
What was your most celebrated financial progress last month? I would love to hear your successes and your fails towards financial freedom!
