Income
There are two ways to improve your personal financial situation: either by making more money or by spending less money. In my 9 to 5 job, I’ve continued to be blessed with a steady paycheck and although I work in tech, thankfully our business has been ok and I’ve survived the layoffs that have occurred. I recognize that there have been lots of layoffs in tech and I am thankful for my employment! So, it’s been steady eddy for me and I’m very excited about that as it means I’m continuing my slow and steady growth plan! August will bring my quarterly bonus, and I did learn that I was awarded a ‘spot bonus’, which more money is always appreciated. These bonuses yes I plan to enjoy them a bit and spend it on some travel (Spain!) but I also plan to save/invest and also try to save a bit for the winter. The month of December always proves to be an expensive one, with the holidays and travel and gifts and all sorts of end of year bills that come due.
In Mrs Money’s world, she is back to ‘full time’ at her work. If you’ve been a reader of the blog, you’ll know that she started a business and to allow herself enough time to spend on it, she went to 50% at her work, which means she got 50% of her pay. Mrs. Money has spent about a year on it and unfortunately I’m so to report is slowing it down. Starting a new business is always hard and risky, and many new businesses fail so we’re totally ok (still bummed) that it didn’t work out and accept it as a risk that we took! Thankfully we had a good financial plan in place and were able to continue our slow and steady growth while she gave this venture a try. Things were getting a bit tight towards the end there, and so I am excited to have her go back more full time at work and her paycheck is nearly doubling. So that’ll be a nice bump for us and will give us a little more cushion on our monthly budget.
We also have a rental property and as it often goes in the rental world; tenants move out and new ones move in. We had a great year experience with our first tenant, but they moved out in June and bought their own house. So we were in the market for new tenants. It’s interesting to see the real estate market slow down a bit – which probably isn’t a bad thing as real estate was a bit too hot in my opinion but unfortunately means we’re currently in month 2 of looking for a new tenant. We’ve dropped the price hoping that’ll help and I imagine it’s a matter of time but it still is a bummer to have to pay that mortgage on our own. Thankfully we were decently conservative with our finances here and a) took the extra rent money after the mortgage was paid and stocked it away and b) can cover the mortgage for a few months no problem. But we’re still anxiously hoping for our next tenant!
Photo by Thomas Park on Unsplash
Expenses
Although inflation may be slowing down a bit (thankfully!), things are still pretty expensive all around. Our weekly grocery run definitely feels more expensive, eating out feels more expensive and gas has once again creeped up a bit. I think life is just expensive and with 2 kids growing up and doing more in life things are expensive! We did get some good news – BabyMoneyFinance is now in Pre-K which means it’s state funded so we no longer have to pay for daycare! So that’s a nice reduction in our expenses at least for the time being! I’m so thankful that Mrs. Money is able to bring in a little more income each month as we were getting to the point where we would have to either stop really watching our spending more or saving/investing less – neither of which I was super thrilled about.
Our other big update is that we purchased a new car! We got a minivan and even got a bumper sticker that says “Never Say Never” as both Mrs. Money and I years ago had both said we’d never get a minivan. As has been our trend, we paid cash for the minivan and got it slightly used. Car prices have been nuts over the past few years to the point that buying new made more sense than new, but they’ve calmed down a bit to where a slightly used could save us some money. We typically pay cash partially because Dave Ramsey has worked into my head that borrowing for a car is ‘dumb’ as it’s unwise to borrow money for a depreciating asset, instead I should invest in assets that rise in value (i.e. stocks/real estate) but also interest rates on cars have crept up along with all other interest rates. Each month I do try to put aside a few hundred dollars to save for a car and we cashed that account out and bought our car!
Saving/Investing
Although it’s never easy, we do continue to invest our money each month in the stock market. Expenses can feel like a lot but we do make it a priority to save for our future. I still set aside 30% of my income for retirement and to purchase company stock, and then outside of that we try to save/invest a little big each month in a brokerage account.
Our other big investment update is we invested in a local small business! It’s a local food/beverage company that we’ve enjoyed and been a part of the community for a few years now, and the chance to invest came up. An earlier investor was looking to sell their shares and Mrs. Money and I teamed up with 2 friends of ours to buy in! It’s an investment that we likely won’t see any return (if any – it is a small business after all) for a number of years but Mrs. Money and I were excited to participate. One of our financial goals recently was to save both for emergencies but also opportunities and this felt like a good opportunity!
Finally, I’ll comment on how as much as it sucks to see interest rates rise for mortgages and cars, it’s pretty nice to see the interest rate in my savings account back up to 4%! If you don’t have a high yield savings account – I would strongly recommend one! If your money is just sitting there, you might as well earn as much as you can from it!
Giving
I feel like I don’t often have much of an update here aside from my normal spiel of “we continue giving to our local church and other nonprofits”, but I’m ok with that update! Mrs. Money and I feel very blessed and enjoy giving back out of the income we receive!
Overall
Slow and steady growth is one of my personal finance mantras and I’m thankful to report I feel like we’re meeting that goal! Little by little we try to make good financial choices both in growing our careers (and income) and balancing controlling our expenses while also trying to enjoy life! We did enjoy an amazing vacation to Italy this past month (LINK) which was so refreshing and rejuvenating for us!
Blog
The blog continues to be a nice little cash cow (or baby cow) for me and it allows me to earn a little bit of mad money each month and pay the hosting fees! I got a little nervous a few months ago when advertising really slowed down (wondering if that was a sign of the overall economy) but it’s picked back up to normal levels since then. In terms of top posts – my Tiny House update was very interesting to readers as was how we spent nearly 1 million points/miles to ball out in Italy and I really enjoyed my post discussing the ‘best credit card’ and how you should focus more on what you’re after from a credit card vs how fancy it is vs how many points you could be earning
Finally, a big thanks for all the support from readers just like you!
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