End of July update

I'm not quite back from my trip yet, but I have an unexpected free hour plus internet connection tonight, so blog update time it is. I'm looking forward to my monthly trip around the internet to see everyone else's end of the month summaries too :)

July was an ok month, neither awesome nor terrible. It started with having to throw out several days' worth of food after a power outage and ended with an out of town trip (always expensive) and a big dinner party. It also included some paycheck weirdness as I waited for paperwork to go through at my new employer. But through most of the month I tried fairly hard to stick to the plan, and the end results aren't too awful, although they also aren't as good as they could have been with the usual "just a LITTLE more discipline."

Food: I totally blew my food budget, coming in at $400 for the month when I'd budgeted $250. I reallocated $50 to cover the emergency at the beginning of the month, and then the extra $100 went on that dinner party plus some food bought while traveling. Sigh.

Rent and utilities and whatnot: $555

Gas, tolls, car insurance: $134

Travel: $458 (plane ticket for my brother's wedding. Not really optional travel.)

Gifts, charity, and entertainment: $105

As the regular reader will recall, I decided not to put anything towards debt or savings in July (except for retirement contributions) so I could start 'living on last month's income' in August. So, my credit card debt is actually going *up* (because I couldn't pay for the entire plane ticket out of this month's travel budget, especially given how badly I did on the food front) and my EF number isn't budging either. Another thing that makes July more of a holding pattern month than anything else.

There is good news on the retirement fund front, though. I put another $500 in side hustle income into my Roth IRA, and also had the first $500 deducted from my paycheck into a 403(b). So that feels like a nice solid contribution in that direction. The total of my retirement accounts is over $4000 now; it seems like it ought to be more given how hard I've focused in that direction lately but it's a start!

Totals for July:

Debt:
-$2159.17, a change of -$301 from the end of June
Net worth:
$4261, a change of +$1863 from the end of June

Career choices and cold hard cash

[This is a scheduled post, since I'm traveling. I'll give an end-of-July update on August 5 or so, when I'm back.]

I've written before about the way in which being single affects my emotional life; I'm more invested in my godchildren than I suspect most people who have their own biological children are, for example. I also take some of that nurturing instinct out on my students. I don't always "click" with my classes -- I've had some real drags -- but I had one last year that was really special. I got an email from one of the students in that class earlier today that made my week; she told me that something from our class had come up in her everyday life and she'd loved thinking about it and had to tell me.

I wish I could get into detail, but it's not really a good idea to talk on the open internet about specific students, even when you're vaguely semi anonymous like me :)

Anyway, I was just thrilled to get this email. I worry about money constantly because my career choice was so fiscally unwise, and I'm afraid that given my one-low-income status I've wrecked my chances at a comfortable retirement. But the occasional thing like this reminds me that there are in fact other things in life; I don't have kids, but there are hundreds of my former students in the world who've engaged with ideas and people they wouldn't have if they hadn't taken my classes. If I stay in teaching, that number will get into the thousands pretty fast. It's not the worst legacy in the world, even if I don't have a dime to leave behind.

Calculating Net Worth

[This is a scheduled post; I'm away until August 6, when I'll do an end-of-July summary.]

Net worth is "duh" levels of simple: take your assets, subtract your debts, voila. Except if you overthink it, and of course I overthink it. I have a Ph.D., it's basically my job.

A major point of contention I see -- and don't have to deal with -- is with real estate. Nobody actually knows what their home is worth (until they try to sell it), so trying to calculate equity with precision is tough. Meanwhile, it's pretty clear what the mortgage is!

Many people include the presumed resale value of their cars. I did that when I first started using mint.com last year, and if I'd kept up with it, I'd have been in "positive" territory a couple of months earlier. But ultimately I decided that the car wasn't really an asset in the sense that I was comfortable with. If tough times hit, I still wouldn't sell it; I need it for basic life stuff. So just like I don't include the value of my one nice piece of jewelry, or my computer, or a few other things that I theoretically could sell but never would, I don't include the car. I might feel differently if it weren't ancient and cheap. That is, if I owned a new-ish car, I might list it because I'd be able to trade down if I needed to. But really there's nowhere to trade down to, given my 14-year-old car.

If I had a house, though, it would always be theoretically sellable for me if I lost my job or etc, so I probably would count my best guess at it in my net worth.

The other sticking point to me is: should I count cash that I know is about to disappear? I generally calculate on the last day of the month, that is, the day before I send in my rent check. My budget suggests that I'm probably going to spend about half my income in any given month. I feel like a more honest net worth might include only the content of my savings/retirement accounts and ignore the money dedicated to daily expenses. However, I am really lazy, and sorting this out would take a lot of work!

So, the end result of my net worth calculation is this: I take the contents of all my checking/savings accounts (I have a slew of them) and add that to the total of my retirement account. Then I subtract my credit card debt (and used to subtract student loan debt. Hey, doesn't that "used to" sound nice?). It might not be the most accurate number, but it feels pretty close to what's right.

Do you guys do something different?

On Dodging Bullets

On a whim this morning (I have weird whims while I'm having my first-thing cup of coffee) I looked at my tax returns going back to 2007, which is the first time I filled out a pdf and thus have a copy saved on my computer. It was also the first full year I was in graduate school. It turns out that from 2007 through 2012 (the last full year I was a grad student), I made anywhere between $25,000 and $35,000 a year. While single and living in New York City.

My first thought is that it's a good thing I don't have any really expensive bad habits, like drinking or gambling. My second is that it's a freaking miracle I made it out with only $19,000 in student loans.

On Not Being Cheap

It's going to be a slow blogging week -- I have two short trips coming up later this week/early next week, so not only won't I be around much, but my end-of-July post will be several days late, most likely. (Not that anyone cares that much! :-)

I also had a guest this past weekend, and since we have mutual college friends that live here, not only did me and my friend go out to eat twice, but we also bought food so we could have our friends over for dinner. And even though all this pushed me over budget for the month, and I'm having some mental trouble with that, I think I need to relax.

The two meals out were about as inexpensive as possible: we had pupusas on Friday night for less than $10 for both of us (I paid) and breakfast at a diner on Saturday morning for somewhere between $10 and $15 (she paid...and omg, as I write this, I'm realizing that I was still sleep-deprived enough that I forgot to leave a tip on the table, as I'd promised to do when she went up to pay the bill. Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeez. Sorry, waitresses.) So, even though if I'd been on my own I would have eaten both meals for 'free' at home, eh, I can't get too worked up.

The shopping trip for dinner is the one that broke the budget. Between the farmer's market and the grocery store I spent $100 (!!!! -- nb, not everything was just for the one dinner, some of it was pantry stuff and household stuff I needed for the future. But it was kind of an unfortunate amount anyway.)

I'm not really sure how I'm going to handle this in the future. Right now I'm handling cooking for others on a budget by doing it less, instead of by finding less expensive ways to do it; it just seems wrong to have people over and not feed them something interesting and made with high-quality fresh produce :) Plus, when you're cooking for more than one, quantity issues come into play. The title of my post started off as having decided that I did put a priority on not being overly "cheap" -- as obsessed with money as I am lately, I don't want to get so obsessed that I stop having people over, you know? But as I type, I'm feeling like I ought to spend more time thinking about how to really cut those expenses down. Like, could I make a pasta dish with vegetables and cheese instead of the four kinds of middle eastern salads I made on Saturday night! I don't know. Deserves more thought, I guess.

The most minor retirement fund milestone ever

I just got the confirmation statement that my employer set up my new 403(b) account -- there's no actual money in it yet (and sadly no employer match) but at least it looks like things will be good to go for my next paycheck.

Actually the whole thing is doing reasonably well. It's still super tiny, but I've added another $500 to my Roth IRA this month (all side hustle income) and the whole thing has collectively grown about $170 since I started it. It's good to watch that, although I'm not really looking forward to my first sustained market downturn, whenever that shows up.

Anyway, all basically good, and July should be a respectable if not spectacular month on most fronts.

Mood Troughs

I'm in one! There are a few external reasons why I'm a little more anxious than usual this week, but it's definitely playing out in money worry (as usual lately.) Objectively, I know things are just fine.

• My net worth is not only still positive, it's grown by a few hundred dollars from last month (and I expect it to grow another $1500 or so before the end of the month)
• My retirement account is still tiny, but I'm making (relative to my income) nice big contributions every month, and have made it impossible to change that easily by having most of it deducted from my paycheck.
• I have a solid plan for what to do with my income this year (debt repayment, short and long term savings, and some planned spending in the travel and car-improvement categories) and reasonable confidence that I will also have income a year from now, although I'm not quite sure where it's going to come from yet
•  I've kept my basic expenses for housing and transportation about as low as they could possibly go unless I were living at home for free
• I'm going to be "living on last month's income" as of August 1. (This is a YNAB thing where you save up enough money to be equivalent to an entire month's income, so that you can use July's income for all your August expenses, August's income for September's expenses, etc. It makes it easier to budget with their software, and also gives you a month's cushion in case of things like job loss. I realized a week ago that I could manage this right now if I didn't make a debt payment or put anything in savings during July except for the scheduled paycheck deduction for my 401(k), so I decided to just take the plunge.)

And yet, here we are, being anxious.

• I can't quite get my numbers to line up in YNAB vs my online bank account records, and even though the discrepancies are fairly small, they're still worrisome. Where did I go wrong?!?!? 
• Even though I think it's a solid decision that will make my budgeting life easier going forward, the idea of not making a substantial debt payment in July makes me a little crazy. I want to see that slider going down, not staying stable or even going up a bit.
• Also making me crazy: the number of not-quite-planned-for expenses that have either appeared, or are looming. These include: buying plane tickets for a wedding (and whatever expenses I incur while traveling); the electricity-related food expenses for this month; some car stuff (registering it in a new state, and it'll need an oil change soon and possibly some more work, some of which is optional but would really improve my life, and some of which might not be optional); an unplanned trip into Nearby Really Big City that included two meals out, gas, tolls, etc); and an impending visit from a friend this weekend, which I'm really excited about but which means probably one meal out and also buying groceries to have mutual friends over for a nice meal; medical co-pays for upcoming therapist and dentist visits. I'm hoping to start a "slush" savings fund sometime this fall (separate from my emergency fund), to handle stuff like this without so much anxiety, but obviously I'm not ahead of myself enough to have done that yet.

Well, I don't know if typing all that out made me feel better or not, but I think it does help to just share the "blah" with the universe sometimes, so...here you go, universe! You're welcome!