Some financial blogs compile their expenses on a monthly basis. Not me! I’m far too lazy! Plus, through our constant churning of credit cards, and the fact that I record every expense on a cash basis, our monthly totals get skewed in weird ways. Quarterly reports allow for smoothing out aberrations and for easier spotting of terrifying and harmful trends in spending!

Q1 2015 Total Expenses: $18,646.13Avg Per Month: $6,215.38

Excluding Debt Payments Total Expenses: $10,919.23

Avg Per Month: 3,639.74

The Necessary Evils :

Our normal mortgage payment is $697, but we have been paying $1,000 extra into it each month.
Our monthly student loan payments are about $210 total, but I also put another $500 into them recently.
And for payments on the car loan, technically they are little under $250 a month, but I just randomly throw money in $500 increments at it, and that seems to work.
That’s our entire home insurance bill for the year, and most of our property taxes. I believe another $1,600 or so is paid in September.
The medical bill is completely related to our recent trip to Peru. Gotta stay healthy!

Home Maintenance and Improvements:

Not entirely sure what all this was for, but I made some trips to Lowes and Home Depot.

Food:

In our never-ending quest to spend less on food, we saw a huge decrease in grocery spending from January ($587) to March ($315). We’ll see how it goes from here.
The wine and beer was mostly for gifts, with a bottle of beer for me as a congratulations gift for all that beer shopping!
The only time we dine out now is basically when people ask us, and even then, it’s through my gritted teeth.
Takeout Food, that is a tough one.  Here and there, it all adds up.

Transportation:

This year is the real beginning of my bus experiment. On average, we spent $90 on gas for January-March, but some of that is holdover from the holidays. I fully expect that to fall to probably $60 a month.
The parking expense is some jive BS. My work takes it out of my paycheck automatically. Since I take the bus most days now, I could cancel it, but if I ever need a parking spot again, I would be on a waiting list of hundreds, so the spot would be as good as gone.
The only other fee was an EZ Pass toll re-fill.

Utilities:

Cable looks irregularly low because a month is skipped  due to credit card due dates. It really is about $70 a month, despite all my rage.
Our gas heating bill was exceptionally low, almost unbelievably low now that I’m looking at it. Here in Cohoes, this February was the 4th coldest month in 150 years! Despite that, we only spent $147 in February heating our 1,900 square foot, drafty old house. That is a real accomplishment! How the heck did we do it? Damned if I know. We keep the thermostats between 58 and 64 if that helps.
Electric bill was normal and boring.
Even more boring than the electric bill is the quarterly water and sewer bill. It hasn’t changed much in years. Exciting stuff here, folks! Can you stand it!!??  You’re reading about my sewer bill!
Telephone was only our Ooma bill for the month, which is just FCC fees.  I believe I have a cell phone payment coming up in June, though. Perish the thought.

Fun Stuff:

Entertainment includes Netflix and Hulu Plus, the cost of shipping books through PaperbackSwap, any music I bought (I won’t chew your ear off about the new Björk and Ariel Pink albums, I promise… but they are both great) and two tickets to see They Might Be Giants in April! (My 14th show, Marge’s 10th, I think)
Recreation was mostly one big expense: flute repair for Marge.
And then there’s Travel. What can I say? It’s a big focus for us. And despite using frequent flyer miles like a boss, we still manage to incur a lot of expense. On the plus side, what you see here not only constitutes most of our 10-day trip to Peru (hotels, train tickets, Machu Picchu tickets) but also our trip to Naples in January, and part of our trip to Japan this October! Two nights at an AirB&B are included, as well as our two round-trip first-class tickets on Japan Airlines (salivate here), which only cost us $161 total out of pocket! So we are getting a lot out of that $1,406.
A breathless travel log and expense recount of our Peru trip is forthcoming.

Pets:

Pets sure are expensive. But at least we are off on a better foot than last year when we started by having to get the rabbits neutered (super expensive) and by the end of the year blew through $3,500.
As for food, Maeby eats Nutro, which is not cheap, but it’s also not junk. For the rabbits, I made my normal order of timothy hay which comes in a huge box about 4 feet tall, costs about $40 with shipping and is enough to last a couple years. They also get regular kibble food. And as for their litter, well, let’s just say that in a future post, you will learn more than you ever cared to know about rabbit litter!
There’s also a city dog license in there.

Miscellaneous:

I donate to charities automatically through payroll deductions and increase the amount every year because it makes me feel like I’m a good person.
Computer expense includes an awesome used tablet we bought on eBay for $69 and three years of web hosting for this blog! Say what you will about Ridinkulous. One thing is true: It will be online for at least three years.
Gifts given? Yes, that’s Christmas, pushed ahead into January because of credit card payment dates. It was much lower than last year’s Christmas total, and hopefully helped along by our excellent homemade apple butter gifts.
In home furnishings, that is mostly our new heated blankey. We can turn our heat down even further and save money with our heated blankey!
Home supplies includes all kinds of things like shampoo, toilet paper, and even last year’s Christmas tree!
Personal Care includes things like Marge’s annual smellgood lotion purchase and a 10-year supply of DIY winterbeard oil ingredients for me.

Anyway, after excluding debt payments, $3,600 seems like more than I’d want to spend every month of the year, but this quarter did include a bunch of large, annual non-recurring expenses. That $940 home insurance bill is only once a year. $2,124 is, sadly, not all of our property taxes, but at least it is most of the annual bill. And the over $500 of medical expense was completely for travel vaccinations, which we won’t need again for many years. It will be interesting to see how much lower our Q2 total is without these non-recurring expenses.

Yearly Goals Progress:

Now, back in January, I made up some goals for the year on the fly. Here’s how we’re doing with them.

Gas:

• Yearly Goal: Under $1,000.
• Spent This Quarter: $270.00
• On track to spend: $1,080

Like I mentioned above, I fully expect gas expense to drop now that I am commuting almost fully by bus, and biking more as usual in the summer.

Dining Out:

• Yearly Goal: Under $1,000.
• Spent This Quarter: $166.28
• On track to spend: $665.12

I think this will be easy. I probably should’ve made this goal harder to attain. But we will probably have to eat out a lot on vacation, which is cheaper in Peru than in Japan.

Takeout Food:

• Yearly Goal: Under $1,000.
  
• Spent This Quarter: $252.52
• On track to spend: $1,010.08

This is going to take some work. We have tried to institute Frugal Fridays, but it still might not be enough. You really have to plan to avoid eating junk food at airports and highway rest stops. And honestly, an artisanal doughnut shop opened recently, and what was I supposed to do? Not try it?

Clothing:

• Yearly Goal: Under $1,000.
• Spent This Quarter: $321.52
• On track to spend: $1,286.08

Uh-oh. We are overspent in this category. All I know is that I only bought two pairs of my favorite Banana Republic pants for $25 each, and a few t-shirts. I don’t know about the rest. *eyes Marge suspiciously*  Hey, what’s that sound…

Marge Says:

Slow your roll, Frugal Path Guerrillas! Let the record show that the clothing items in question were purchased in December 2014 which I feel should not count against Q1 2015 numbers.  I have purchased naught one shred of “apparel” in 2015 save for a replacement pair of *Keens .  This was at Norm’s suggestion, mind you, because mine had holes and there was hard core hiking coming up.

*Keen Footwear is in no way affiliated with Ridinkulous, Inc. and has not sponsored this post. However if they wanted to, it would be totally cool….. For the ways I create, care and play,  I’m always in Keen.  Keen Footwear, for your “Hybrid Life”!

Years of Savings:

This magical calculation demonstrates how far we could get if we kept living every month like this ones listed above.  We take our investable assets and divide them by our monthly expenses above. The number to shoot for is 25 years, because at that level of savings, you could theoretically afford to live forever on your money stash, based on a 7% return and 3% inflation.

This quarter, according to our monthly average expenses and our investable assets, we have…

2.6 years of savings

But if you take out the all of the debt payments and consider only what we would have been paying had all of the loans been paid off, we have….

4.4 years of savings.

This will probably improve in the future, right? Right?

Retirement Location Possibility!

If we take that number of years of savings above, and divide by 25, we can figure out where in the world we could afford to retire right now by dividing another country’s cost of living  price index by our own cost of living. I used Rochester, NY, for our own cost of living (154) since it is the closest city to us on Expatistan’s index and is very comparable price-wise.

Our International Retirement Cost of Living Number is….

26.8

According to Expatistan’s index, that means we can retire… nowhere!

You can calm down now. I know how super-exciting this all was. Maybe make yourself a cup of tea and have a lie-down. Is the kettle on?

The post Ridinkulous Quarterly Expenses: Q1 2015 appeared first on RidinKulous.

And according to our Planting Our Pennies-inspired Retirement Locale calculator, for the first time since we’ve been releasing quarterly expense reports, we can afford to retire somewhere in the world! Where could we immediately quit our jobs and move to? Read on to find out!

And remember, I exclude all income and expenses related to our income property.

Total Expenses: $11,194.08
Avg Per Month: $3,731.36

Without Debt Payments Total Expenses: $5,745.21

Avg Per Month: $1,915.07

Savings Rate: 71.7%

The Necessary Evils :

Bye bye, student loans! I will be more than happy to see this line item disappear. I got this delightful email from Sallie Mae when it was all done:

Indeed.

Mr. Bucket

Home Maintenance and Improvements

The only big expense here is hiring the professional to fix our leaky pipe.

Latke waffle with sour cream and smoked salmon

Food:

The big investment in food preparation this quarter (and this is actually included under Home) was that I bought a deep fryer! I had my eye on it on Amazon, and the price dropped to $28 so I bought it. I rarely deep fry anything, but when I do, this will make it much easier than using a pan. Plus, you can re-use the oil! Since burned bits drop below the heating element, they don’t cause a nasty taste to develop.

Transportation:

Like I said, I will be eliminating that pesky parking expense that is deducted directly from my paycheck, saving about$90 a quarter. Seeing as how I take the bus or bike to work most days, (and that parking expense was more than the bus expense!) it’s a good idea to go without it.

Utilities:

Super typical expenses all around for utilities. That telephone bill is made solely of our Ooma bill. We pay for our Tracfones once a year. And actually, mine isn’t due to be paid for another 18 months.

Maeby on Mount Jo

Fun Stuff:

Though we made travel plans, our Travel expense this quarter was shockingly low. We went to Cape Cod for Memorial Day weekend, but since we rented a house with another couple (and got a partial refund because of a drippy toilet), it was a very cheap trip. We went to Lake Placid for a weekend, but since we used two freebie hotel nights, that was a free trip! And we booked some of our hotels for next January’s Thailand trip, but since hotels there can be very cheap, and I used Barclay Arrival points to offset the cost, they hardly had an impact at all. For envy’s sake, we will be staying at the Kate & Hasu Boutique Hotel in Chiang Mai, and the Sea Far Resort on Koh Kood.
Recreation expense was purely $10 paid to park at the Adirondack Loj for a hike near Lake Placid.
Entertainment cost was the usual – Netflix, Hulu, newspapers on Sunday… I went to a few roller derby bouts, and I bought albums on BandCamp by Carol Cleveland Sings and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. I’ve been listening to Smith’s antiquey beepy-bloops a lot while reading.

Pets:

We all know why our expense was so high this quarter. Maeby got an ouch-y on her side after a very short stay at a dog park, which necessitated a trip to the vet on a Sunday and thus most of our Pet expense this quarter.  I’m still glad we don’t have pet insurance.

Miscellaneous:

All pretty reasonable expenses here. Included under Charity is three dollars Marge donated to the Hillary Clinton campaign just to get a woman’s card. Brilliant piece of marketing, that.

Goal Progress

Back in January, I made up some goals for 2016. Here’s how we’re doing with them.

Total 2016 Non-Debt Spending of $30,000: 

• Spent so far: $16,313.70 (Q1 = $10,668.49 / Q2 = $5,745.21)
• On track to spend: $32,827

Pretty close! We really brought our expenses down this quarter. If we can manage keeping the rest of the year under $14,000 total, or $2,333 per month, we will meet this one.

Savings Rate of 65%: 

After a disappointing savings percentage of 44% in the first quarter, this quarter really made up for it. Halfway through the year, we are almost back up to our goal of 65%! Our method for calculating our savings rate is shown here.

Pay off Student Loans: 

• Balance at January 1: $5,916.51
• Balance Today: $0

All gone!

Max Out 457 Plan and Roth IRAs

• Goals: $18,000 in 457 Plan / $5,500 in each Roth IRA
• Saved so far: $8,948 in 457 Plan / $4,375 in each Roth IRA

Easily on track to max out my 457 Plan. I have also been trying to max out our Roth IRAs early this year, so later we can…

Contribute to Marge’s 401(k)

Marge’s workplace still hasn’t transitioned to their new 401(k) provider, although she assures me they are making the transition. As it is, they are still with the provider charging astronomical fees.  Once the transition is complete, I am hoping we can max out her 401(k) contributions for the year, because the clock is ticking.

Read 24 Books

• Read so far: 16 (Six this quarter)

The best I read this quarter was probably Dark Tide, a historical account of the 1919 Boston molasses flood. I also read and liked The Big Short and Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry, but you probably already know about those.

Watch 36 Movies

• Watched so far: 22 (Nine this quarter)

Three recommendations: Everest is a tremendous survival film about the doomed 1996 expedition. If you like horror, you can’t do much better than The Witch. And I watched the oddest documentary called The Institute about a real life game / art project.

Write 52 Blog Entries

• Written so far: 26, including this one.

Right on track!

Years of Savings:

This magical calculation demonstrates how long we could live off our investments.  We take our investable assets and divide them by our monthly expenses above. The number to shoot for is 25, because at that level of savings, you could afford to live forever on your money stash. According to our monthly average expenses and our investable assets, excluding debt payments, we have…

10 years of savings.

Retirement Location Possibility!

If we take that number of years of savings above, and divide by 25, we can figure out where in the world we could afford to retire right now by dividing another country’s cost of living  price index by our own cost of living. I use Rochester, NY, for our own cost of living since it is the closest city to us on Expatistan’s index and is comparable price-wise.

Our International Retirement Cost of Living Number is….

60

So for the first time, according to Expatistan’s index, we can retire… in Hyderabad, India!

I don’t know anything about this place, but when I Google Image Searched it, the second suggested word was “slums.” So I don’t see us moving there any time soon. It astounds me how profoundly disorganized and corrupt India is. They put our wealth gap and bureaucracy to shame! Usually the only news stories coming from India are awful things, but last week there was much ado about a relaxation of restrictions on foreign investment, so that should help bring in some much-needed jobs.

The post Ridinkulous Quarterly Expenses: Q2 2016 appeared first on RidinKulous.

What I’m NOT a fan of is calculating savings rates. What do you include as an expense and what don’t you include? Do you include 401(k) contributions as income? Is the whole debt payment an expense or just the interest part? Is home maintenance an expense or an asset?

Everyone seems to have their own method of calculating their savings rate, and just to muddy the waters, I’m going to introduce my own!

Unrelated picture of Cornelius & Klaus

Expenses: Here’s our 2015 expense report. For this report, I will exclude the principal payments on debt and include only the interest portion as an expense.

Income: Here’s where it gets complicated. This will be all of our take-home income, after everything gets taken out, with our 457 and 401(k) plan contributions added back in… but at 60%.

I know, I know, it sounds crazy. But hear me out. We can safely assume that if we had been paid those contribution amounts as income instead of putting them in tax deferred accounts, they would have been taxed at a 25% federal rate, plus state taxes and various payroll taxes. So let’s estimate that 40% would disappear before it hit our bank account. By adding back the contributions as income at 60%, we are mocking up what our take-home pay would have been if we took our entire paychecks home.

But what about our rental property? I am excluding all of our rental property income and expenses because I like to treat that as its own self-supporting business, separate from our personal spending. And the way I see it, the rental is an investment, so all of the start-up costs we endured this year (down payment, closing costs) are by default included as savings, same as if we had invested it in the stock market.

Caution – I will be showing you our after-tax income! Since it’s inherent in any savings rate calculation, I know you’d just be doing it in your head anyway, so why not just include it.

I can never think of any good pictures for these number-based posts…

So here’s a picture of a goat calendar.

From our annual expense report, we know that…

Expenses Excluding All Debt Payments = $35,373.10. Now add…

Interest Paid On Debt

So for our purposes, Total Expenses, Less Principal Payments = $38,043.82

We put almost $20,000 into tax deferred accounts (would’ve been more if it weren’t for Marge’s terrible 401(k) choices!), so our mocked up After Tax Income is $89,354.48. The difference is our savings at $51, 310.62.

Savings Rate = Savings / Income = $51,310/$89,354 = .574

So our Savings Rate is 57.4%! I was hoping to hit 50%, so I’m happy.

Another utterly irrelevant picture

Hey kids! Here’s a lesson I wish someone had taught me years ago. Through determining your savings rate, we can discover how many years it will take until your investments will cover those expenses, and you can retire! Incredibly, there is a formula for that and it works.

Mr. Money Mustache teaches us that a 57% savings rate means you only have to work about 14 years until your assets support your lifestyle.

Here’s a fun chart

What does the average Joe save?

The Federal Reserve keeps stats on this. Ever since the early 1990s, the average individual’s savings rate has hovered around 5%. During one month (December 2012) it peaked at 11%, and the highest the savings rate has been in the observable past is 17% in May 1975. I got you beat, Average Joe! I beat your ass two time! Three time!

At a 17% savings rate, you’ll still have to work for 40 years like a sucker before you can be financially independent. And at 5%? Well, I don’t even want to think about it! If you save 5% of your income, you’ll hopefully be relying on a pension or Social Security, or else be enjoying a restful retirement from the grave.

What’s your savings rate for the year? What convoluted method did you use to calculate it?

The post Our 2015 Savings Rate appeared first on RidinKulous.

Total Expenses: $16,323.43
Avg Per Month: $5,441.14

Without Debt Payments Total Expenses: $10,668.49

Avg Per Month: $3,556.16

Savings Rate: 45.8%

The Necessary Evils :

That there is the final car payment! Marge’s 2013 Toyota Corolla is officially paid off. Fun fact: The car has 15,000 miles on it, which after 2.5 years means it is averaging only 6,000 miles per year.
Marge and I both had several doctors and dentists’ visits this quarter, making for an unusually high Medical expense.
That is our home insurance for the entire year, and we made $2,000 in extra student loan payments to help get them paid off very soon. And that is also just more than half of our property taxes for the year.

Food:

Moroccan Stew

I think there is some leftover Christmas party and gift food inflating that grocery bill, and many, many cinnamon babkas made for friends and parties. We also hosted about sixteen people for a wine-tasting party with mucho food, and Marge competed in a mac & cheese competition (if you’re curious, reuben mac & cheese, and no). All things considered, this is a pretty good total. And a lot of good food.

Kingston Rhinecliff Bridge seen from Poet’s Walk

Transportation:

Mostly just commuting this quarter, although we did meet my parents down in the Hudson Valley for lunch and then Poet’s Walk hike in Rhinebeck. $65.72 a month for gas is about $10 less than what we spent on average last year. No car insurance or work on the car this quarter. All is good!

Utilities:

That is one enormous telephone bill for us! Our normal monthly bill for Ooma is about $4. But Marge and I both bought new cell phones! We now have matching Moto E’s, which at $40 each is a slight upgrade for Marge, but a massive upgrade for me. For the first time in my life, I have texting capabilities!
You might remember me as a non-texting “a phone is a phone” candy bar-style evangelist. But we are renting our property out to Millenials. (Ugh, young people) And they like to text instead of call, so I basically needed to text for “work.” This shouldn’t mean anything additional on our monthly bill, though. I still expect that to come out to $5 a month for each of us. Honestly, if you’re spending more than $5 per month, you’re doing it wrong.
Our gas and electric bills look especially high this quarter. Over the years, our utility company has slowly and surely been backing up their payment date, until March, when we had one payment due March 1, and another due March 30. So this quarter includes four payments, not three. Shouldn’t happen again for a long time.

Fun Stuff:

We’ve been lucky enough to have a lot of free entertainment this quarter. We got free tickets to a Ladysmith Black Mambazo concert, the Mac & Cheese Bowl food festival, an Albany All-Stars roller derby bout, and a Neko Case concert! Basically that entertainment expense is just Netflix, Hulu, some iTunes music, newspapers, and I donated to my friend Simply Sylvio’s Kickstarter campaign for Sylvio – The Movie!
The recreation expense is totally our camping reservation for next Labor Day, most of which will be refunded. We lock up two weeks in advance, and decide later which days to use.
Travel is mostly a huge payment and deposit to reserve a cottage on Cape Cod that we are splitting with another couple on Memorial Day weekend, so we will be getting most of that back.

Pets:

Nothing out of the ordinary for the pets this month. Just food, a dog license from the city, and about 200 pounds of rabbit litter from Lowes!

Miscellaneous:

I made my big once-annual clothes shopping trip to the outlet mall, armed with Banana Republic gift cards from Christmas. I picked up three pairs of pants at the Gap, a few button-down shirts, a t-shirt, a long-sleeve shirt, probably a few other things I can’t remember. Marge got a few things as well, and we paid $0 out of pocket. Other than that, we also bought some hiking shoes at LL Bean partially with gift cards, and Marge spent a bunch on boots.
My big frugal clothing win was a pair of sunglasses: eBags.com gave me free e-Bags money to use since I bought our backpacks from them long ago. I put that towards a pair of sunglasses which I only had to pay 94 cents for out of pocket, shipping included.

Gifts: We apparently we were VERY generous this Christmas, which we paid off in January. We gave people heated blankets, shoes, LL Bean clothes, handmade jewelry, made lots of fancy soap, which required lots of supplies, along with supplies for embroidery gifts.

Goal Progress

Back in January, I made up some goals for 2016. Here’s how we’re doing with them.

Total 2016 Spending of $30,000 (excluding debt payments): 

• Spent so far: $10,668.49
• On track to spend: $42,673.96

Uh oh. Our total 2015 spending was $35,373. We are on track to be much higher than that! I will take heart in the fact that this quarter contained our annual home insurance bill, and most of our property taxes. And I know we won’t have a repeat of that Gifts expense this year! Those three combined are about $4,500 of the $10k total.

Savings Rate of 65%: 

• Savings Rate so far: 45.8%

Our method for calculating our savings rate is shown here. Total Expenses, less principal on debt payments / Take Home Income, plus 401(k) contributions at 60%.

Pay off Student Loans: 

• Balance at January 1: $5,916.51
• Balance at March 31: $3,564,15

I had to meet a minimum spending requirement on a Barclay’s Arrival card, so what better way to meet a spending requirement than to pay down debt at the same time! I threw an extra $2,000 into our student loans. Responsible, eh?

Max Out 457 Plan and Roth IRAs

• Goals: $18,000 in 457 Plan / $11,000 in Roth IRAs
• Saved so far: $4,187.38 in 457 Plan / $1,000 in Roth IRAs

Right now, our weekly scheduled savings should have these retirement plans maxed out by the end of the year.

Contribute to Marge’s 401(k)

Marge’s office still hasn’t switched from their infamous 401(k) provider. They promise to, but still haven’t made the jump! Hence, she hasn’t started contributing anything yet.

Read 24 Books

Really good progress so far on this one. And I’ve read some really great books. Personal favorite would have to be The Stench of Honolulu by Jack Handey. That was maybe the funniest, but definitely the oddest book I’ve ever read. Other greats were The Man In The Rockefeller Suit about the imposter known as Clark Rockefeller, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson, and Quiet: The Power of Introverts In A World That Can’t Stop Talking.

Watch 36 Movies

In looking over the movies I watched this winter, you might think I’m a sucker for thrillers with The Gift, 10 Cloverfield Way, United 93, and Compliance on there, and you might be right. I liked all of those a lot. United 93 might be the best of those, despite how difficult it is to watch, but I have a special place in my heart for The Gift, especially the weirdo ex-schoolmate of Jason Bateman’s character. The other two movies I really liked were Blue Is The Warmest Color (and not just because of that one scene) and the 1950 film noir Gun Crazy. The worst movie I watched might’ve been Terrance Malick’s ponderous pilgrim story The New World if it wasn’t for the fact that I endured CBGB, an exerable viewing experience that only occasionally becomes so bad it’s good.

Write 52 Blog Entries

• Written so far: 16, including this one!

Years of Savings:

This magical calculation demonstrates how long we could last if we kept living every month like this quarter.  We take our investable assets and divide them by our monthly expenses, without debt payments, above. The number to shoot for is 25, because at that level of savings, you could afford to live forever on your money stash. According to our monthly average expenses and our investable assets, we have…

5 years of savings

Retirement Location Possibility!

If we take that number of years of savings above, and divide by 25, we can figure out where in the world we could afford to retire right now by dividing another country’s cost of living  price index by our own cost of living. I use Rochester, NY, for our own cost of living since it is the closest city to us on Expatistan’s index and is very comparable price-wise.

Our International Retirement Cost of Living Number is….

31.5

According to Expatistan’s index, that means we can retire… nowhere!

How were your expenses this quarter?

The post Quarterly Expenses and Goal Progress: Q1 2016 appeared first on RidinKulous.

We’ve been putting away money into our money market account rather than the retirement accounts this quarter. We are looking at moving to a new place in the area, and we need a fat down payment for that. Unlike stashing money in the retirement accounts where you tend to forget about it, putting it into a money market account is a real boost to the old self-esteem. It somehow feels realer. I feel a bit freer to spend, unlike when it’s locked away for retirement and you’re not allowed to think about it. Obviously, it hasn’t changed my spending that much, since we still topped 60% for a savings rate again. But it’s weird to have immediate access to that much cash.

Total Expenses: $12,787
Avg Per Month: $4,262

Without Debt PaymentsTotal Expenses: $9,744

Avg Per Month: $3,248

Savings Rate: 60%

The photos you’ll see are all either from the Dutchess County Fair in August or from our Thousand Islands camping trip during Labor Day week.

Summary

Description

Serious Stuff:

Property taxes are the school taxes for the year, less the refund we get from the state for our city keeping tax increases under 2%.
No extra mortgage payments or any other extra debt payments.

Diner breakfast!

Food:

Didn’t eat here…

We went out for breakfast one day while camping. Treated my parents out to lunch when they came to visit. And I probably overspent at the grocery store. Maybe it has to do with the confidence of having a full-to-bursting money market fund.

Upgrading our camping transportation from the Civic

Transportation:

The only bad thing about buying a new car is that you have to pay for it. Speaking of wanting to stash more money in our money market mutual fund, I took a five year loan for our new car so I wouldn’t deplete the fund. I know… Blasphemy. I plan on paying it off much earlier than that.
One of the benefits of having a new car is that it has untold safety features my 2005 Honda Civic could only dream of. That means the insurance cost is lower, which resulted in a refund.
Big auto service costs this quarter because Marge’s Toyota needed new tires, alignment, annual check-ups, etc. Gas cost was higher than normal because our driving to western New York for Independence Day and for camping.

Utilities:

Incredibly average month in utilities! Electric is up because we need an air conditioner to sleep in the summer. Cable is a basic internet-only plan.

Sheep judging sure is fun!

Fun Stuff:

Entertainment includes a pair of $75 tickets to see The New Pornographers at the cozy Levon Helm Studio in Woodstock! They are maybe my favorite band around. I have seen them before, but it was my first time seeing Neko Case perform together with Carl Newman, so that was very special and the venue was the best venue. Only a 150 or so seats. No food for purchase, but everyone brings snacks to share.
One thing we didn’t have to pay for was tickets to the first Aurora Games in Albany where we got to see Katelyn Ohashi do her famous floor routine for the final time! (Marge got tickets through work)
Recreation included Marge’s dance class tuition for the entire year.
Travel expense includes our hotels in Puerto Rico for next February, and a couple weekend trips this fall to Vermont and Cape Cod.

Miscellaneous:

Is it wrong that I’m including political donations in my Charity category? It’s the first time I’ve ever given to a campaign. Who is it? You’ll never be able to figure it out! (Hint: You probably have a problem pronouncing their name)
Clothing includes a bridesmaid dress that Marge got for a wedding next year in Ireland. Gifts also includes something for the same’s wedding shower.
Home includes all of those things like paper towels, soap, and toothbrush head, but also includes maybe my favorite purchase of the year: a robot vacuum! We bought this Eufy brand vacuum used on eBay for $60. Our floors have never felt so nice to walk on barefoot. The previous owner put these googly eyes and mustache on him to give him some character.
Pets included just paying for someone to watch our rabbits over the July 4th trip and Labor Day camping, plus typical food and litter.

Eufy!

Goal Progress

Total 2019 Non-Debt Spending of $30,000:

• Spent so far: $27,746
• On track to spend: $36,994

This annual goal we always miss! Good news is that if we do end up just under $37,000, we will be at the same level of spending as last year. I’ve been using this same $30k goal for years now, and just figuring on inflation, it will probably never happen, so I should probably increase it next year to something achievable.

Savings Rate of 65%:

• Savings rate this quarter: 60%
• Savings Rate so far this year: 59.3%

We are incredibly close for once! Usually our fourth quarter is good for savings (there must be no big property tax bill or something) so even though it’s still a long shot to hit 65%, we could come close!

Sad!

Max Out 457 Plan and Roth IRAs

• Goals: $19,000 in 457 Plan / $6,000 in each Roth IRA
• Saved so far: $5,454 in 457 Plan / $6,000 in each Roth IRA

Notice, these are the same as last quarter. We didn’t put any more into the work retirement plans, but I just changed the contributions so we will be putting in more for the final three months of the year, but they won’t be maxed out.

Contribute to Marge’s 401(k)

• Goal: $10,000
• Saved so far: $3,965

See above. If my calculations are correct, based on the contributions I scheduled for Marge’s 401(k) she might just hit $10,000 by year end.

Read 25 Books

I finished seven books this quarter bringing my total to 19. It’s the anniversary of the Manson murders, so I read Helter Skelter, which felt like 2,000 pages long by the end. By contrast, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian was very good and just the right length. But if I had to recommend one book I read this quarter, it would be Pete Buttigieg’s Shortest Way Home. No reason! Who is this guy anyway?

Years of Savings:

This magical calculation demonstrates how far we could get if we kept living every month like this ones listed above.  We take our investable assets and divide them by our monthly expenses above. The number to shoot for is 25, because at that level of savings, you could afford to live forever on your money stash. According to our monthly average non-debt expenses and our investable assets, we have…

11 years of savings

Retirement Location Possibility:

If we take that number of years of savings above, and divide by 25, we can figure out where in the world we could afford to retire right now by dividing another country’s cost of living  price index by our own cost of living. I averaged Buffalo and Hartford for our own cost of living since those are the closest to us on Expatistan’s index.

Our International Retirement Cost of Living Number is….

70

According to Expatistan’s index, that means we can retire in…

Minsk, Belarus!

One of my favorite travel blogs wrote a gushing entry about Minsk, so I hold it in high esteem. It’s not a place I ever think about, except as this punchline on Seinfeld.

Notably, at the bottom end of Expatistan’s index are a bunch of cities in Argentina like Buenos Aires and Cordoba because their currency is especially worthless right now. We could live like kings there! I mean, until the tenuous economy goes south.

The post Ridinkulous Quarterly Exepenses: Q3 2019 appeared first on RidinKulous.

Fancy Japanese hotel!

It’s been a ridinkulous year here at Ridinkulous Headquarters. We bought a rental property in order to hasten our early retirement goals. We spent almost three weeks on vacations in Peru and Japan. And we DIY built a stone patio, wood fence, and an 8’x10′ shed in the backyard.

Surely all of this fancy living will show in our expenses, right? Wrong! Because while compiling our expenses for the entire year, I found we spent less this year than ever before! Well, as long as you eliminate money spent on that rental property… I count that as a separate business and its own income statement is forthcoming.

In the next few weeks, I’ll compare this year to past years and see exactly how we made 2015 our most frugal year ever. But today, let’s just look at the numbers.

2015 Total Expenses: $54,038.23Avg Per Month: $4,503.19

Excluding Debt Payments Total Expenses: $35,373.10

Avg Per Month: $2,947.76

The Necessary Evils :

Pretty self explanatory. For more details on those loans, check out our Debt Progress page.
Property Taxes – People in the blogosphere are often astounded at how little we paid for our house and rental property in upstate NY. The flipside of our low housing prices is our high property taxes. And as any debt paydown aficionado will tell you, you can pay off your mortgage, but those property taxes will follow you to the grave.
Medical – Much of this is our hepatitus A shots for visiting Peru.

DIY all the way

Home Maintenance and Improvements

Contractors – This is the cost to eradicate bats from our house, and also the cost of re-wiring the electrical to our house after the neighbor’s tree fell in our yard.
DIY – The DIY cost is basically the entire cost of our backyard patio and shed project. We paved our backyard with real granite stones and built a 8’x10′ shed with plans found on the internet. You can see the work in progress above. It’s all done now, and photos are forthcoming

Food:

This is our lowest total food expense since 2007! Incredible. I chalk it up to making lots of big batches of food for lunches and dinners, and nearly eliminating Takeout Fridays.
Dining & Takeout Food – Despite restricting our eating out expenses, we still had many amazing meals. Not a dollar was wasted. The only things I eat outside the house are things I just can’t get or make at home. See the fresh maguro bowl at Tuskiji fish market or the ceviche or the chocolate con churros in Lima. The key to not spending a lot dining out is to never go to a chain or a place that makes everyday food. (I lift this rule for the occasional breakfast diner, a guilty pleasure)

Transportation:

Auto Maintenance & Other – Includes the obvious, along with registrations, EZ Pass tolls, and the charge to take a defensive driving course which lowers our insurance.
Gas – Speaking of lowest totals ever, this is our lowest gas expense since merging bank accounts over ten years ago! And seeing as how I only put about 2,000 miles on my car this year, it might be time to sell it.
Car Insurance – We just switched companies, which should take $400 off our annual bill next year. Even more if I sell my car.
Bus Tickets – I commuted to work mostly on the bus this year, but the cost was still less than maintaining a parking spot at work. I continue to keep that parking spot because it comes in really handy when heading to NYC for a flight.

Utilities:

Cable – We brought our cable expense from $75.12 down to $34.99 a month by first switching out Time Warner’s rental modem for one we purchased, cancelling our basic cable, and getting a frustration discount for having to deal with Time Warner customer service reps.
Gas – Incredible! Our heating bill has never been lower. This is partly because natural gas prices are lower than ever, and because we bought an electric blanket to keep us warm at night. Consequently, we keep our thermostats between 59 and 64, or 66 if we’re feeling radical. For those interested, that is the heating bill for a 2,000 square foot house.
Electric – Our electric bill has also never been lower! Although I couldn’t tell you why this is. Possibly just because of the lower prices.
Telephone – We are almost five years into using Ooma as our home phone, and it still costs under $4.00 a month. I also bought an Ooma Linx for $40.00 so we can finally have a phone on the 2nd floor of our gigantic house. We also paid $64.95 for my annual cell phone bill. So yup, that’s $12/month for all the phones.

Fun Stuff:

Entertainment – $462 of that was spent on concerts and shows like They Might Be Giants, Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, and Hamilton on Broadway. There’s $248 on movies in the theater, and $324 on in-home entertainment like Netflix and Hulu. Overall, this was an average year.
Recreation – This was mostly Marge getting a flute part fixed for $178, and some sights around Peru and Japan. Hiking doesn’t cost anything, even popular hikes like Breakneck Ridge in Cold Spring, NY, as seen above!
Travel – Obviously was a big expense, what with two trips to Peru and Japan. Mostly this is transportation expense ($1,301.21) and hotels ($1,768.02). We actually only spent $161 on flights this year. Thanks, frequent flyer miles!

Pets:

Maeby the greyhound and the two bunnies continue to generate a ton of expense. Mostly this is due to Maeby getting her teeth cleaned this year, and having to board her during those long trips.

Miscellaneous:

Charity – When I started my first job out of college, I started donating to charities through our payroll deduction program. I promised myself I would raise the amount every year, and I have. This coming year, the lucky charities are Doctors Without Borders, Water For People, our local community center, a pet fostering group, and our local Planned Parenthood.
Clothing – See below!
Computer / Web – This includes our used Asus tablet, a used iPod Touch for me, a used 5th gen iPod Nano for Marge, and our web hosting. So that’s a lot of computer fun for $315!
Gifts Given -We save a lot of money on Christmas gifts by making them, like these cans of apple butter last year, and homemade soap this year!
Home Furnishings -This is mostly our incredible heated blanket, so handy for lowering heating bills in the winter, and some odds and ends like ice cube trays and kitchen stuff. It also includes our real Christmas tree.
Home Supplies – Toilet paper, paper towels, sponges, light bulbs, garbage bags… you get the picture.
Personal Care – This is mostly Marge’s 18-month gym membership at $468, and other odds and ends the Marge buys that I don’t know what it is.
Postage – Mostly from selling stuff on eBay and sending Christmas gifts and cards.

Back in January, I made up some goals for the year on the fly. Here’s how we did.

Yearly Goals Progress:

Gas: 

• Goal: Under $1,000.
• Spent: $875.31

Lowest gas expense ever!

Dining Out: 

• Goal: Under $1,000.
• Spent: $913.80

Phew! I was worried about this one. With every dinner out with friends, I could see the numbers adding up. We managed to keep this down by not going out to eat by ourselves at all except while on vacation.

Takeout Food: 

• Goal: Under $1,000.
  
• Spent: $693.42

We came in way under the $1,000 here. Like I said, this is simply due to us hardly ever getting Friday takeouts now.

Clothing: 

• Goal: Under $1,000.
• Spent: $853.01

Personally, I spent a grand total of $161.54 on clothes this year.  A chunk of that was at the Banana Republic outlet, where I also spent a large gift card, and another $41 was on a new pair of fancy brown shoes since the last ones got holes in ’em.  The remaining $691.47 is Marge.

Years of Savings:

This magical calculation demonstrates how far we could get if we kept living every month like this ones listed above.  We take our investable assets and divide them by our monthly expenses above. The number to shoot for is 25, because at that level of savings, you could afford to live forever on your money stash. According to our monthly average expenses of $4,503.19 and our investable assets, we have…

3.67 years of savings

But if you take out the all of the debt expenses and consider only what we would have been paying had all of the loans been paid off (as we’re planning in retirement), $2,947.76, then we have….

5.6 years of savings.

Retirement Location Possibility!

If we take that number of years of savings above, and divide by 25, we can figure out where in the world we could afford to retire right now by dividing another country’s cost of living  price index by our own cost of living. I used Rochester, NY, for our own cost of living since it is the closest city to us on Expatistan’s index and is very comparable price-wise.

Our International Retirement Cost of Living Number is….

32.93

According to Expatistan’s index, that means we can retire… nowhere!

How do your expenses for the year measure up? Show ’em if you got ’em!

The post The Ridinkulous 2015 Annual Expense Report appeared first on RidinKulous.

Our pet medical expenses also included a dental cleaning for Maeby! This requires her to be knocked out cold because, although she’s a chill dog, she won’t allow anyone near her mouth. So in order for her to keep her notoriously bad greyhound teeth in tact, she periodically has to go in for that procedure.

In good pet news, though, we adopted a new bunny. Her name is Freya and here’s a picture of her relaxing in the gym.

Total Expenses: $10,424.14
Avg Per Month: $3,474.71

Excluding Debt Payments Total Expenses: $8,340.40

Avg Per Month: $2,780.13

Savings Rate: 55.3%

Summary

DIY lounge chair

Details

Serious Stuff :

Just the normal mortgage payments this month, although I’m planning on making extra payments again starting next month! The DIY expenses were mostly for building a lounge chair in the backyard, which we’ve been enjoying on the weekends. (Plans here)

Sometimes we eat out

Food:

Massive food expense this month! We way overspent dining out. With Marge going on a trip to Vegas, several trips out with friends, and visiting the grand opening of a new branch of our favorite restaurant (now dangerously close to home) we will definitely end up far ahead of 2016’s total dining expense. Grocery expense was also $500 more than last quarter, and I’m not even sure how! I am proud of making those DIY bagels, though.

Transportation:

Well if it wasn’t for that damn insurance, transportation cost would be almost nothing! Just AAA membership, new wiper blades, tolls, registration, and some gas. Plus my usual bus tickets since I usually take the bus to work.

Utilities:

Cooler months mean less spent on gas heat. And once we fixed the toilet, the water bill went back down under a hundred dollars a quarter. We just received our new internet bill, and the price is going from $39.99 to $44.99 since Spectrum just bought our company Time Warner Cable. Hey, I thought corporate consolidations were supposed to save us money! Ha ha ha ha ha!!

Green Animals Topiary Garden

Fun Stuff:

Entertainment includes Netflix, Hulu, New York Times online, a few albums, and a month subscription to Tunnelbear (shhh!) so we could watch the Eurovision Song Contest live. For Travel, we paid for our hotels in St. Kitts and Nevis later this year, and bought our Megabus tickets to Toronto for the CNE!

Maeby enjoying the beach in Eastham, Cape Cod

Pets:

Like I said, those pet medical bills are a killer.

Miscellaneous:

Very good so far this year on clothing expense. We’ve hardy bought anything. No need to institute a clothes shopping ban! Just replace things when they need to be replaced. I assimilated into the borg joined the club and got a FitBit, which is included in home expense. No need to buy a new one at an exorbitant price, though. I got mine for $20 on eBay.

Goal Progress

Total 2017 Spending of $30,000 (excluding debt payments): 

• Spent so far: $19,661.52
• On track to spend: $39,323.04

Not doing so well here. Those unexpected expenses always get in the way. We can only spend just over $10,000 for the rest of the year and still come in under $30,000.

Savings Rate of 65%: 

• Savings Rate this quarter: 55%
• Savings Rate so far this year: 46.1%

Falling short again! It always sucks to miss this goal, but then I remember that the average personal savings rate in the U.S. is about 5%. Our method for calculating our savings rate is shown here.

Max Out 457 Plan and Roth IRAs

• Goals: $18,000 in 457 Plan / $5,500 in each Roth IRA
• Saved so far: $8,888.92 in 457 Plan / $2,000 in each Roth IRA

We’re on track to max all of these out. We’ve even started to contribute to Marge’s terrible 401(k). The mutual fund choices may be awful, but we desperately need to reduce our tax bill. We simply make too much money! So even though the fees on the 401(k) are bad, the effects of the tax hit now would be marginally worse, so we are contributing to the 401(k), but not maxing out. Those vultures are not going to get all of our money!

Read 24 Books

Behind schedule! I read Your Money Or Your Life, the sort of ur-text for the modern early retirement movement. I should really write a review of it, since I have thoughts on it. But then I also read Grimm’s Household Stories, and I probably have MORE thoughts on that! I mean, I’m all about improving your financial know-how, but Grimm’s fairy tales are just so unbelievably bizarre, I think it would be good for everyone to get lost in its weirdness, so I have to recommend that.

Years of Savings:

This magical calculation demonstrates how far we could get if we kept living every month like this quarter.  We take our investable assets and divide them by our monthly expenses above. The number to shoot for is 25, because at that level of savings, you could afford to live forever on your stash. According to our monthly average expenses (excluding debt payments) and our investable assets, we have…

9.45 years of savings

Retirement Location Possibility!

If we take that number of years of savings above, and divide by 25, we can figure out where in the world we could afford to retire right now by dividing another country’s cost of living  price index by our own cost of living. I used Rochester, NY, for our own cost of living since it is the closest city to us on Expatistan’s index and is very comparable price-wise.

Our International Retirement Cost of Living Number is….

65

According to Expatistan’s index, that means we can retire… Chisinau, Moldova! I don’t know anything about this place, but a Google search’s second result is Is It Worth It To Visit Chisinau, Moldova where the author calls Moldova the most boring country in Europe. Work on your SEO game, Moldova!

The post Ridinkulous Quarterly Expenses: Q2 2017 appeared first on RidinKulous.

I should also mention that, due to one simple typo in my calculations, our savings rate for 2018 was 48.7%, not 43.2% as I had said. Watch your negative signs, everyone!

Total Expenses: $13,225.12
Avg Per Month: $4,408.37

Without Debt Payments Total Expenses: $11,141.38

Avg Per Month: $3,713.79

Savings Rate: 41.8%

Summary

Q1 is typically one of our higher-spending quarters during the year. That is when the Christmas spending comes due, and when we’ve had some big trips in the past few years. Our savings rate would’ve been higher though.  Since Marge just started a new job, she had to take our trip unpaid since she didn’t have the vacation time accrued yet, so our income wasn’t as high as it could’ve been.

Details

Serious Stuff :

Standard mortgage payments this quarter. I did make some extra payments on our HELOC, but I count those as Rental expenses since we used it as a down payment on our first duplex. As for medical expenses, why are you interested in the details? What are you, some kind of sicko? We did have one major home maintenance expense. We paid to have our hot water boiler fixed/cleaned. We had a high efficiency boiler installed almost ten years ago and neglected having it cleaned. Well, it started making rumbling sounds and shutting off intermittently. So the lesson is, have your boiler cleaned every so often!

Duck kway chap

Food:

No excuses. We spent a lot on food this quarter! That grocery bill is totally out of bounds. I still don’t know how we do it. Too many boxes of spring mix salad greens and packages of smoked salmon?

At least our dining expense was spent overseas and with family and friends in New York City. We don’t normally dine out at home. We got to try many new and weird dishes in southeast Asia. The blob with the green worm things on it is chendol, a shaved ice dessert served with coconut milk, green jellies, and in this case, durian on top. (I could do without the durian) The soup at the top is duck kway chop at a roadside stall, and the noodles below are assam laksa. I came back craving some of these, but alas, it’s not easy finding Malaysian cuisine in upstate New York. Come on, globalization! Hurry up!

After some modest success growing herbs outdoors last year, I started an indoor grow box to start some herbs from seed this year. Maybe I’ll do an entry on that, but basically it’s a cheap cooler with a hole cut in the top for a daylight LED bulb. I’m starting to see some buds a week after starting them, so hopefully it will work out and I’ll at least save on herbs this year.

Air Asia flight arrives in Langkawi

Transportation:

That’s a first class seat, guys

Gas expense was a bit higher than it used to be because Marge is having to drive to work now. Parking expense is entirely for parking at the train station. Once trip was for going to visit the grandparents in Buffalo at Christmas, and once for taking the train to NYC for our flight to Malaysia. Among our frequent flyer miles, we even have Amtrak points, so we can hack train tickets, but the parking is not free. Over the Malaysia trip, my car battery died, and it was old enough that I just went ahead and replaced it, which is the bulk of the auto maintenance cost.

Chinese New Year in Hong Kong

Utilities:

More adventures in cable. A week before our trip, our internet went out. The cable company shut off internet to our entire block because there was some threat of an overload on the cables or something. I don’t know. But we spent A WEEK without internet, and actually had to leave on our trip with the thing still not working. We had our phones, but there’s only so much you can do on phones. There are bills to be paid, and as prolific credit card churners, there’s like a dozen credit cards to be paid! So I actually had to go to the library with my laptop and pay credit cards. I also rented a bunch of DVDs while there (Back To The Future II, Creed, Point Break) since we only have television through the internet.  The library is a great resource, but man am I glad that’s over.

Supertree Grove

Fun Stuff:

The bulk of our Travel expense is our annual Cape Cod vacation rental. I’ll be getting  some of it back as a security deposit. Another big part is AirBnB rentals for an abandoned trip to Norway. Ugh. I had booked a solo trip to Bergen for a week, as I did last year, on Norwegian Air direct from Newburgh, New York. Wouldn’t you know it, but they were flying this route with Boeing 737 MAX aircraft. Yeah, the bad one. So they cancelled my flight and offered to route me from New York City through Oslo and on to Bergen, which added 3-4 hours each way and was on different travel dates. I said no thanks. So I’ll be getting a refund for the flight ($250) and for the AirBnB rentals ($600) in the next quarter.

The bulk of Recreation expense is our annual camping trip to the Thousand Islands in September. You have to reserve it far in advance, and I will get a partial refund for the days we don’t use. Also, fees for Marge’s dance studio were over $300. She takes classes and choreographed and danced for a show.

Recreation also includes all of the fun we had in Southeast Asia! The Singapore Zoo, the Singapore National Museum, Peranakan Mansion in Penang, and so on. One day I will write about this trip!

Entertainment includes things like Netflix and Hulu, tickets to a Belle & Sebastian show in July, a New York Times digital subscription, and tickets to see The Favourite at a fancy cinema in New York City.

Pets:

This was mostly paying for a rabbit sitter for our two weeks away. They don’t come cheap!

Miscellaneous:

Gifts Given includes Christmas, plus some souvenirs we bought overseas. Home expense includes dumb things like toilet paper, and also a humidifier for our bedroom because I constantly wake up with a sore throat in the winter from how dry it gets. Also, a “new” (used) Canon camera because I dropped my old one on the Cape Cod beach and I couldn’t get it it work again. Charity deductions automatically come out of my paycheck every two weeks. I increase the amount every year. Cash is the miscellaneous cash expenses I’ve managed to spend and not track.

Goal Progress

Total 2017 Spending of $30,000: 

• Spent so far: $11,141
• On track to spend: $44,564

We will exceed this goal once again? Probably.

Savings Rate of 65%: 

• Savings Rate so far: 41.8%

Hopefully we can get this up again. Our method for calculating our savings rate is shown here.

Max Out 457 Plan and Roth IRAs

• Goals: $18,000 in 457 Plan / $6,000 in each Roth IRA
• Saved so far: $4,496 in 457 Plan / $1,000 in each Roth IRA

This should be fairly easy. Just as a reminder, the limit on Roth IRAs this year is $6,000, so increase your contributions!

Contribute to Marge’s 401(k)

• Goal: $10,000
• Saved so far: $2,961

Marge has a nice selection of funds in her 401(k) at her new job. But with the changes in the tax law, I did some calculations, and at our income level, it isn’t really worth it to max out. Maybe you remember my breakthrough analysis Ranking The Retirement Accounts. But basically, it is worth contributing to deferred tax retirement accounts to the point that we keep any of our dollars out of the 22% bracket. So basically by contributing around $10,000 this year, we should stay completely in the 12% bracket. Now that’s planning!

Read 24 Books

Not doing so well on this front. I managed to start a load of books, but only finished three. I started three other e-books that auto-returned to the library when I accidentally turned on my Kindle’s wi-fi, so I will have to finish them later. But all three books I did finish (above) are fantastic. I seem to go on these streaks and read two or three similar books, completely by coincidence. Bad Blood and Billion Dollar Whale are both about financial fraud. Right now I’m in the middle of three books which all focus on people living in the middle of nowhere (one is avoiding the law, the other two are religious nuts) There seems to be an Elizabeth Holmes frenzy going on right now, and I can tell you that the HBO documentary is good, the podcast is better, but the book is the best.

Years of Savings:

This magical calculation demonstrates how far we could get if we kept living every month like this ones listed above.  We take our investable assets and divide them by our monthly expenses above. The number to shoot for is 25, because at that level of savings, you could afford to live forever on your money stash. According to our monthly average non-debt expenses and our investable assets, we have…

8.6 years of savings

Retirement Location Possibility!

If we take that number of years of savings above, and divide by 25, we can figure out where in the world we could afford to retire right now by dividing another country’s cost of living  price index by our own cost of living. I averaged Buffalo and Hartford for our own cost of living since those are the closest to us on Expatistan’s index.

Our International Retirement Cost of Living Number is….

53.2

According to Expatistan’s index, that means we can retire… nowhere!

The post Ridinkulous Quarterly Expenses: Q1 2019 appeared first on RidinKulous.

Now we live in this world where the difference between and the haves and the have-nots couldn’t be laid more bare. People who don’t need to work at all can hole up, safely away from the world. People with the privilege of working from home (like us) get to earn money as usual without putting themselves at risk. And the people who were already living without a buffer are the ones either getting fired or being told they have to show up in person to work and put their lives at risk at the same time.

It’s been pretty eye-opening. Even people whom I know to be libertarian-leaning are shocking me by preferring to stand on fundamentalist soapboxes instead of, you know, caring if people live or die. We live in the richest country in the world. There’s no need to force people to work who don’t need to. We can, you know, provide for people while we work through this! What a sick time to be greedy. You won’t hear me complain about how our stocks absolutely tanked. There are more important things. There ain’t no economy anyway if people are so scared of getting sick that they refuse to work. That’s something these “open it up” people don’t seem to understand. You can’t have an economy without healthy people, and it’s gonna be a while until we’re back there.

Total Expenses: $20,748
Avg Per Month: $6,916

Without Debt PaymentsTotal Expenses: $17,705

Avg Per Month: $5,902

Savings Rate: 18.2%

Summary

The reason that savings rate is so low is completely due to having our bathroom renovated. Sure, we could’ve done it ourselves. Actually, now that I think about it… maybe not. There was a problem with the floor basically collapsing under the toilet that required some serious know-how. But if you were to assume that the renovation isn’t really an expense because it adds value to our house, our savings rate jumps to 46.7%! Now that’s more like it.

My co-worker

One fun thing this month, at least, was that our local humane society held a fundraiser. For $20, they would have a volunteer draw a portrait of your pet, stipulating that few of them were actually talented artists. Naturally, I bought one for each of our pets!

Serious Stuff:

No extra mortgage payments this quarter. The property taxes are one half of our county taxes for the year. And the contractor expense is our bathroom.

Mofongo de Pulpo in San Juan

Food:

Most of the dining expense here is from our trip to Puerto Rico. When you’re in San Juan, you have to eat out. Octopus mofongo, mallorcas, ceviche, lots of mojitos, arepas, fried cheese, tacos… Most of our trip, though, was spent on the island of Culebra, where we took advantage of the kitchen in our villa and cooked everything.

We also had a night out with our Vermont friends in January, and taste-tested the Popeye’s chicken sandwich vs the KFC sandwich. (Popeye’s won) I bottled a batch of saison, and am now fermenting a batch of grapefruit IPA.

Ultimate in transportation

Transportation:

One of the good things about being under quarantine is that everyone is driving less. With Marge and I working from home, you should see a lower Gas and Bus Ticket expense next quarter. Still have to pay off that Subaru loan, though.

Remember Places?

Utilities:

Same old, same old.

Chilling with my tank on Flamenco Beach

Fun Stuff:

Wow. What a bummer this expense is. Not only because it’s so high, but because so much of what was paid for was or might be cancelled. We had a Postmodern Jukebox show get cancelled. We are supposed to go to Cape Cod on Memorial Day. There’s the wedding in Ireland in July. Who knows what the landscape of restrictions will look like in these places by then.

On the plus side, more musicians are doing live shows online in this COVID world. And as I type this, I’m watching Slim Cessna perform live. He’s been on my list to see forever and I’ve never been able to, so this is the next best thing. I also bought a bunch of records on Discogs for my birthday. Discogs is like going to a huge record fair, but with all the adventure removed. So it’s not as fun, but you can find everything you want.

A big chunk of Entertainment expense was my batch of 20 movie tickets I buy in bulk from my union benefit program. Also the New York Times digital subscription, Hulu, and Netflix.

Pets:

Spent a bit paying the pet sitter while we were away in PR. Klaus also had a health scare. He wasn’t eating much and was losing hair on one spot. Brought him to the vet where he got a shot. He’s getting to be an older bunny, so we put some softer surfaces in his house to save his feet. Now he’s being more active than he has in a long while.

Miscellaneous:

And yes, some of that charitable spending was political donations to a presidential candidate that dropped out. All I can say is, wouldn’t you feel better having at least one choice under the age of 70 right now??

Goal Progress

Total 2019 Non-Debt Spending of $35,000:

• Spent so far: $17,705
• On track to spend: $70,823

Well, this goal is not happening, what with our bathroom renovation expense. We did spend $11,868 not including the renovation, so maybe we can hit it absent renovation expense.

Savings Rate of 65%:

• Savings Rate so far: 18.2%

Here is another goal I’m pretty sure we’ve mathematically eliminated ourselves from. Still, I will see if we can hit 65% absent renovation expense.

Max Out 457 Plan and Roth IRAs

• Goals: $19,500 in 457 Plan / $6,000 in each Roth IRA
• Saved so far: $0 in 457 Plan / $1,500 in each Roth IRA

I haven’t put anything into the 457 Plan yet, and I wouldn’t have put anything into the Roths either, except for the recent market crash. I decided to deploy some cash to buy stock index funds on the cheap. Since the 457 and 401(k) plans are through work and there is a lag, it was easier to take advantage quickly through the Roths.

Contribute to Marge’s 401(k)

• Goal: $10,000
• Saved so far: $0

Another one we haven’t put anything to

Read 26 Books

One very positive book about Nordic model economies. Another which I thought would be a counterpoint to the Nordic model, but actually ended up being positive as well, and very funny to boot. One book by the drummer of the band that did “Closing Time,” and one book by two of the “stars” of Gogglebox. And, of course, the latest Michael Lewis book about the unheralded good done by government “bureaucracy.”
(Funny that I read The Fifth Risk in February because people are now dying because of that risk.)

Burn 3,000 calories on 200 days

I was much better about exercising at the beginning of the year, as everyone is. I had a good routine early in the year because I have a lot of walking built into my normal work day, and I just needed to add a little running on a treadmill to hit that 3,000 mark by the end of the day. Ever since I’ve been working from home since mid-March, it’s been hard to find a new routine. It seems like I need to wake up extra early and get it in before work starts.

Pay off Subaru

Haven’t made any extra payments yet this year.

Pay off HELOC so $10,000 remains

Haven’t made any extra payments on the HELOC yet either.

Years of Savings:

This magical calculation demonstrates how far we could get if we kept living every month like this ones listed above.  We take our investable assets and divide them by our monthly expenses above. The number to shoot for is 25, because at that level of savings, you could afford to live forever on your money stash. According to our monthly average non-debt expenses and our investable assets, we have…

5 years of savings

Retirement Location Possibility:

If we take that number of years of savings above, and divide by 25, we can figure out where in the world we could afford to retire right now by dividing another country’s cost of living  price index by our own cost of living. I averaged Buffalo and Hartford for our own cost of living since those are the closest to us on Expatistan’s index.

Our International Retirement Cost of Living Number is….

40

Higher spending than normal, plus the stock market crash means we can definitely retire nowhere.

The post Ridinkulous Quarterly Expenses: Q1 2020 appeared first on RidinKulous.

We usually work through the summer while everyone else at work takes time off, so I look back at my photos to remember the big events, but I have zero photos from August. We did go to Saratoga to meet my parents. I spent most of the summer pining for our annual week-long camping trip to the Thousand Islands. I hardly took any photos this summer except while on this trip, so that might be all the photos you see this time!

Just as a reminder, these expense entries do not include any income or expenses related to our rental apartment. That gets its own separate entry!

Total Expenses: $10,447.60
Avg Per Month: $3,482.53

Without Debt Payments Total Expenses: $8,363.86

Avg Per Month: $2,787.95

Savings Rate: 47.8%

Summary

Details

Serious Stuff :

Nice refund on our home insurance since we changed companies. The property taxes comprise all of our school taxes for the year. Medical expense includes new contacts for Marge. Home maintenance include supplies to repair our back gate which fell apart. (Look up how to build these things on YouTube instead of just improvising!)

So much bad vacation food

Food:

Groceries expense is higher than normal basically because Marge is experimenting in eating a lot of meat.
Wine & Beer includes some mail order beer recipes I’ve been making. The local homebrew store closed, so I basically have to order online. I’ve made a porter, hefeweizen, and coffee stout. Promise I’ll write an cost analysis of homebrewing one day!
Dining and Takeout were on par for what I like to see: under $1,000 each for the year.

Transportation:

I took my 2005 Honda Civic in for annual service. They found the light over the license plate was out and, since I was trying to get my state inspection done at the same time, they wouldn’t let me complete the inspection without fixing the light. So I decided to just get it done then and there, and that tiny light ended up being very expensive. And to add insult to injury, the old plan I had through the dealership giving me free oil changes and tire rotations for life (the only reason I go to the dealership anyway) was eliminated! Guess where I won’t be going to have the car serviced next year!

Utilities:

Utilities are very nearly identical to this quarter last year. Cable internet expense is up another $5.00 a month. We managed to spend less on gas and more on electricity. We had a few disgusting heatwaves which required some heavy-duty air conditioning, so I’m not surprised.

Dog Ear Books, Hoosick

Fun Stuff:

Entertainment includes Netflix and Hulu subscriptions, books, movies, music and live shows. I’ve basically been listening to three musical acts this summer: Superorganism, who I also saw perform live in Albany, Razika, who have a new album coming out soon with a perfect pop single, and Jessy Lanza, because I like to ride my bike and pretend I’m in this video:

Recreation

Pets:

This is mostly Maeby’s euthanasia and subsequent cremation. We had an in-home euthanasia (highly recommended for pets who hate the vet) and a separate cremation. All told, it was $525. It was about as gentle a process as you could hope it would be, although the memory still haunts me sometimes if I think of it, so I have to watch it. That might be because, although I’ve put them down, I’ve never actually watched a pet die.

Comorant

Miscellaneous:

Clothing expense has been very good this year. Through some kind of system snafu, I get a $10 coupon to Eddie Bauer every month or two, despite not having an account at Eddie Bauer, and maybe never even shopping there before. I’ve used five of these so far this year to get cheap hoodies, shorts, and t-shirts. Soon my entire wardrobe might be Bauered
Charity is my bi-weekly payroll deduction of $25 to various charities.
We actually had to re-order checks, so we have a bank charge this quarter. Checks! Can you imagine? Various taxes on our rental properties can only be paid with checks.

Goal Progress

Total 2018 Spending of $30,000: 

• Spent so far: $29,053.36
• On track to spend: $38,737.81

As usual, we are on track to overshoot the $30,000 goal, but it’s good to have goals, right?? Every year for the past three years, we have strangely ended up just short of $36,000, so keep your fingers crossed that hopefully that is where we’ll end up again this year.

Savings Rate of 65%: 

• Savings Rate so far: 36.9%

This isn’t happening. Last year’s savings rate was 47%, so maybe we’ll come close to that? Our method for calculating our savings rate is shown here.

Max Out 457 Plan and Roth IRAs

• Goals: $18,000 in 457 Plan / $5,500 in each Roth IRA
• Saved so far: $12,556.28 in 457 Plan / $2,535 in each Roth IRA

I delayed putting any money into our Roth IRAs until the second half of the year to help our with a short term cash flow problem brought on by the rental property purchase in March. So we should have all of these maxed out by the end of December.

Read 24 Books

I got caught up on my goal this quarter by reading ten books. Hmmm… definitely only a few themes represented there: hiking/survival (2), politics (2), death industry (2), comedy (2), and country living (one fiction, one non-fiction). If I had to recommend one, it might be Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, Caitlin Doughty’s memoir of working in a crematory, but it’s really only for people with a very dark sense of humor. The Road To Unfreedom is probably the best book of the bunch. It finally clearly explains this particular moment of Russian and American political history, but it could also bore your eyes out.

Years of Savings:

This magical calculation demonstrates how far we could get if we kept living every month like this ones listed above.  We take our investable assets and divide them by our monthly expenses above. The number to shoot for is 25, because at that level of savings, you could afford to live forever on your money stash. According to our monthly average non-debt expenses and our investable assets, we have…

10.9 years of savings

Retirement Location Possibility!

If we take that number of years of savings above, and divide by 25, we can figure out where in the world we could afford to retire right now by dividing another country’s cost of living  price index by our own cost of living. I used Albany, NY, for our own cost of living.

Our International Retirement Cost of Living Number is….

65

According to Expatistan’s index, that means we can immediately retire in a few places, few of which I’m familiar with. Aguascaliente, Mexico looks nice, and after reading the aforementioned Road To Unfreedom, I am really feeling Kiev, Ukraine. But just looking at pictures of the mountains around Almaty, Kazakhstan, maybe I’ll go there!

How was your quarter?

The post Ridinkulous Quarterly Expenses: Q3 2018 appeared first on RidinKulous.