Background
Each month I will post an update on my finances to both give you, the reader, some insight into my situation and to give me markers of my progress on my financial journey. My updates include both spending and net worth.
- Spending is divided into joint and individual spending. My husband gets $600 a month and I get $150 a month for our own individual spending as an “allowance” which go into our personal bank accounts.
- I don’t include charitable contributions in our numbers below, but we allocate 10% of our post-tax income to this each year.
- Our net worth goal tracked using undisclosed units of money. Our goal is to hit “Financial Equilibrium”, based on Thomas J. Anderson’s book The Value of Debt in Building Wealth. This is fairly close to our FIRE number.
Spending
Net Worth
Monthly Update
On my maternity leave and been chilling all month. It’s been nice to unwind. Board games, reading, exercising, and of course sleeping as much as I can. Baby is still en route and we have an induction scheduled for this week since I’m late-term and it seems like my cervix still hasn’t effaced at all, so fingers crossed that everything goes well. I’m more than a little nervous— about things going wrong during delivery, about being a mom, about my relationships all changing, etc. But it’s coming, whether I’m ready or not, so… there we go!
In financial news, the market saw a slight rebound this month, so that helped our net worth a bit. I’m still being cautious and keeping a high cash position probably through the end of Q1 (possibly early to mid-Q2), at which point I’ll probably throw more of it into the market. I still plan to quit my job after my maternity leave— part of me feels like it’s kind of a selfish/“bad person” thing to do, but at the same time I don’t really have a ton of loyalty or feelings for my employer/corporations in general.
Once I’m past the fourth trimester blur (around April/May-ish), I’m going to start testing the waters to see how the job market is. Right now it seems like there are a lot of hiring freezes at the big public companies, but I still see startups sending job postings my way. Alternatively, I’m interested in starting my own business. We’ll see what I feel up to once Little Bub is here.
On the spending front, we had a a couple big unexpected one-offs like fixing our HVAC system (which decided to die in the middle of a snowstorm) and replacing a flat tire. Also, food. I did some tracking of our food expenses this month. There are definitely things we can cut, but also holy crap food prices are so high now. We spent $900 just on groceries alone, with no food waste and doing half-vegetarian/half-meat meals each week. I took a look at our grocery receipts (my husband usually goes to the store for us) and yowza, everything is so much more expensive than I remember it being. And when I look online now for what it costs for fancier cuts of meat (I don’t think I’ll ever eat a lamb chop or scallop again for as long as I live), I’m seriously agog. I don’t know how other families are getting by. Is it just our grocer? Is it what we’re cooking? I’m honestly baffled.
How was your January?
Yet Another PF Blog 