September 2006 Score Card — Part I: Expenses

September was just the second time in as many months that I recorded our monthly expenses. Though the history is kind of short, I can still see some patterns of how and where we spent our money. One problem, however, is that since I didn't have a budget ahead of the spending, I really can't say how good or bad we did in terms of achieving our goals. 

Summary:

Excluding some fixed items, such as mortgage $1635 (including $400 additional principles), child care $800, and homeowner's fee $190, the total expenses of last month were $1648.88, increased $329 or nearly 25% from August, when we spent $1319.89 in total.

The big jump: 

Subscriptions: The big jump in expenses was attributed to a couple of one-time spendings. In September, I transfered my diary from Blogger.com which is free to its onw domain and paied $166.80 for two-year subscription. Also I renewed my subscription of the Time magazine for one year, which cost me another $29.95. These two items make up the Subscription category.

Baby spendings: In addition, we bought about $110 of toys for our daughter when there was a sale in September at Toys R Us. It has been a while since we bought the last big item for our daughter and I felt obligated to get her some new stuff to play with. Before the end of this year, we will get her some small toys from time to time, but the spending may not be at this scale. The toys and subscriptions together reached $310, close to the $290 increase from August.

Also during the Labor day holiday, we shopped some clothes and shoes for our daughter. We founds some good bargains at Kohl's and most items we bought were T-shirts as the summer was winding down. My wife and I didn't add anything to our closets. The expenses on clothing was about $92 in September. Early in the month, we took our daughter to NJ state aquarium down in Camden and the expenses for the trip goes under the Entertainment category.

The big drop: 

The biggest drop we saw last month was the cost to fill up our cars. Thanks to recent sharp decline of gasoline prices, we saved almost $100 at the pump, down from $304 in August to $209 in September. Though the gas prices may keep the recent downward trend (I paid $2.19/galon today to fill up my car), it's unlikely we will see a drop as big as what we have seen in the past month. Therefore, I don't expect any significant relife at the pump through the winter. Actually, I will be very happy if the priece stays at the current level. 

The usual stuff:

All other expenses in September were usual stuff and the spending was under control.

Grocery: Instead of listing them separately, I put our spendings at Costco and ShopRite under the same Grocery category. In September, we managed to go to Costco only twice and spent about $170 over there, down from $210 in August.  

Auto: This was for the oil changes for the two cars. Sometimes I told myself maybe I should do my own oil change to save money, but never really started. I guess I wasn't confident enough when it comes to cars. So instead of do-it-myself, I paid $55 to get it down.

Amazon.com: This part was mainly for severl purchases I made online that came with mail-in-rebate. I recored it as expenses as the rebates were filled in September and no refund was received.

The month of September may not be a very typical one as we had several one-time spending. I am still in the process of figuring out our spending pattern in order to get a budget ahead of spending. Let's see how October goes. 

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