By now, I found myself getting upset each month as paid bills. I kept spending and spending, and I didn’t like the balance I was seeing in my checking account. I knew I needed to find a way out of this mess I had gotten myself into. I had to get control over my spending.
So I decided to track every single expense. There are so many ways to set this up automatically, and I had done that previously before I became a single parent. But this time, I wanted to be very hands on with this, so I went old school. I set up a simple Excel spreadsheet and started listing columns, which I later added to:
- Rent
- Rental insurance
- Electric
- House gas
- House water
- Cable/WIFI
- Netflix
- Groceries
- Car loan
- Car gas
- Car maintenance
- Car insurance
- Car tolls/parking
- Gifts
- Donations
- Groceries
- Dining out
- Kids
- Health
- Pet care
- Travel
- Gym
- Entertainment
- Hair
- Clothes
- Misc.
You could argue that I could collapse some of these, but I wanted to get a close look at specific places that were pain points for me. Living in an expensive area, rent was obviously the biggest expense at $2,300. But I was paying a fair market value for that. I really wouldn’t find anything cheaper in this area.
Groceries and dining out were the next biggest areas at about $650 each per month. I knew I’d need to cut there. The biggest surprise for me was pet expenses. By tracking my expenses, I found that I was paying an average of $340/month on my pets. This includes vet visits, food, medicine, and pet sitters (while I’m on travel). I was really surprised by this amount, and I knew that I could cut it, so I did. My kids were now 17, and they could stay at the condo by themselves and take care of the pets when I was away and they were in town. That saved me on pet sitters although not as much as I hoped because a lot of the pet sitter money is for when we’re all out of town. I don’t live close enough to my friends where I could ask them to take care of the pets, but I’m still thinking about finding someone that I can trade off with meaning that I’ll take their dog when they’re out of town, and they can take mine when I’m out. Then I can get a feeder for my one cat (who would eat himself to death if given the chance), and I can leave food out in a bowl for the other one who exercises more discipline. So long term, that’s what I intend to do.
But I knew I could still do more, so I decided to tackle the expense of the cat food. Because the one cat had urinary tract issues, I had both cats on a special urinary tract wet food. This was costing me about $100/month. So I trimmed that by giving it to them only once a day and supplementing with giving them dry food the other time a day. I am contemplating taking the cat who doesn’t necessarily need this special food off it and having her eat only dry food, but for now I’ve split the difference because I have read a lot about how cats really need the wet food to get their nutrition and water. They generally don’t drink enough on their own.
One of the biggest things I noticed with this exercise is that by being cash poor and having no reserves, I was always one big expense away from trouble. Whenever travel came up, it hit me hard. This occurred several times throughout the year, mostly for volleyball trips. There were long weekends that cost $1,200 because of hotels in the area raising their prices for events, or because in addition to the hotel stay, there were also flights, a rental car, and more eating out.
At times, I felt like things were almost happening at me, and I was trying to keep up and figure my way out. I hated that I sounded so negative all the time, such a downer for those around me because I started to comment on how expensive things were. I was trying to keep my head above water, and my body was growing tired of treading water. It was wearing on me, and I had to find my way to shore where I could take control of my life.