We’re terrible at living frugally apparently, which will probably make it harder to reach financial independence.  We’ve been crammed into our tiny 1 bedroom apartment with a dog, 2 cats, and 4 birds for 5 months now.  Our expenses should be minimal and we should just be socking away money.  I mean, we are still saving, but when I look at Personal Capital at the end of every month (I actually look at it every day) our expenses just seem so high.

Part of this is I probably have unrealistic expectations and I don’t fully understand all our annual expenses (we’ve been tracking total expenses for less than a year).  I need to get a handle on lunch time excursions at work, we took a vacation last month (I still need to do the analysis on those expenses), but there are other expenses that just keep popping up that I hadn’t thought about before.

January

January Expenses

• Mortgage: $2,109 (last month of our mortgage, sale closed on 1/25/2018)
• Storage: $1,002 (PODs for moving the shipping container to our new location and storage for a month)
• Water bill: $600 (this technically covers two months since it also included the final meter reading when we sold our house, these months were much higher due to sprinkler usage in the new landscaping we put in to sell the house)
• Automotive: $561 (150K service on the car)

February

February Expenses

• Pet care: $1,616 (Adopted a new puppy that required hospitalization plus dog related supplies)
• Car insurance: $805 (car insurance for 6 months, this should start going down once points drop off someone’s driving record)

March

March Expenses

• Cell Phone: $826 (Lady Kit’s cell phone died, we replaced with a Pixel 2, we could have gone cheaper, but the Pixel 2 is one of the few phones that works on Project FI and it has a great camera which got use out of on our Costa Rica trip, and has lots of storage for all those pictures)

April

April Expenses

• Vacation: $320 (1 hotel, and taxes for the plane tickets)

Dog training: $250

May

May Expenses

• Vacation: $1891 ($70 is gifts for family, some touristy stuff, getting ripped off by a taxi driver the first night)

Additionally this is the first year we have a High Deductible Health Plan and we have now met the deductible for Lady Kit (so her healthcare expenses should be a lot less for the rest of the year).  We are expecting to buy a house this month and in discussing our financial plans I think we are going to refocus our efforts to trim our budget (hopefully June will look much better).  I have our goal set at $5,000 a month which for FI-minded people should be easily doable, but between some of these one off expenses and just being sloppy with our budget we have missed this mark every month this year.  Can we make it for June?