Our First Quarter Expenses: 2007 Edition
In the wake of a great March I wanted to share some thoughts on what I think have been good financial decisions for us this year. To paint a picture of where we are now, I want to show where we started. This has proved difficult since I only have last year’s data entered into Quicken, thus I can only show you what we have done since last year.
By only showing you the data from 2006 is it tough to truely appreciate how far we have come. (You probably won’t hear that everyday from someone with $140,000 of non-mortgage debt!)
Here is a chart with our expenses after the First Quarter of 2006:
A large proportion of these expenses were related to one time events like moving across the country and getting married:
- In January 2006 my wife moved to the same city and incurred all the costs one normally associates with moving across the country. Her work paid for some of the moving expenses but not the costs of establishing a new household, thus our household expenses were high for that quarter.
- As with most couples we had the costs of maintaining two automobiles, renting two apartments and the cost of food. Pretty normal expenses and likely proportional to what most people in a larger city spend.
- Out of proportion due to the one time nature of the event is the large percentage of clothing and wedding expenses. Combined these made up 15% of our expenditures and were our third largest expense. The good news from this is that we are not stuck paying for these things years down the road plus interest.
Contrast that with our expenses from the first quarter of 2007:
There are some differences to note:
- The first thing some people may notice is that the total expenses for the quarter have been cut almost exactly in half which in a way makes some sense because we sold or eliminated half of our largest expenses from last year. Most people who get married will probably not see such a dramatic difference.
- Vacation is higher in the first quarter because we had to purchase airline tickets for two trips that will occur in the second quarter. One of those trips I am expecting a partial reimbursement from my Residency program because it is an educational conference.
- Utilities are high because we consolidated our cellular plans to a family plan which resulted in a one time, cancellation of contract fee that I was unable to avoid.
- My wife deserves some recognition for her cost consciousness and for almost completely eliminating our clothing expenses thus far.
- The large Other category is just a combination of multiple other small expenses like magazine subscriptions, postage, dry cleaning, etc……
We hope to continue on our success so far this year. We are very close to being able to live on just my salary alone which would be a great accomplishment for us.
