New Year. New Budget.
Things are about to get a whole lot less exciting with this year’s budget. We’ve been growing our net worth by $50,000+ per year over the last four years, but with Girl Ninja no longer working, we’re definitely gonna be slowing things down in the “getting filthy rich” category. What else would we expect when we voluntarily walk away from an extra $35,000/year.
Fortunately, we value family over finances, so although we might not make as much this year, I have a smokin’ hot wife and an awesome kid.
Below you’ll find a screenshot of our 2015 budget coupled with our 2015 financial goals/predictions.
If you want to view the spreadsheet at normal resolution just give it a little click.
Before Tax Income:
I still think it’s stupid we have our gross income included in our budget. But yet again, I leave it anyways.
It’s only purpose in my budget seems to be to remind me how much of “my” money I don’t get to keep thanks to taxes and other deductions.
You’ll notice below my gross income, I have a section titled Side Hustle. This is money I think I’ll make from random opportunities (puppysitting, odd job, etc). As you can see, at $100/mo I’m not expecting anything too crazy. A few years back I sold my PF soul and brought in five figures per year from this site, but I decided to bring it back to my roots and say “no thanks” to advertisers.
I hate when other bloggers host “guest posts” that are clearly articles they got paid to publish. Or when they mention some product or service and include a billion affiliate links to said service.
Investments:
Still planning to throw 10% of my income towards my 401k. As a government employee I have access to some of the cheapest funds in existence so it would be silly for me to not take advantage of the virtually non-existent expense ratios.
I’m planning to make our annual Roth IRA contribution here in the coming days. It’s always painful parting with $5,500 from my bank account, but then I have to remind myself that $5,500 is going to be worth a heck of a lot more down the road. I
Retirement isn’t going to pay for itself and there’s no better time to start investing for the future than yesterday now.
Expenses:
Pretty self-explanatory. I include a 10% “other” category at the bottom of the expenses section as it seems most months have unexpected or non-budgeted things come up (household stuff, a weekend trip, birthday parties, etc). Instead of making random guesses how much we spend on cleaning products or clothes each month; we just try to keep all those miscellaneous expenses less than 10% of our net income.
We also tithe/donate to charity monthly, but didn’t think it was necessary/appropriate to put those numbers in the spreadsheet.
Left Over:
This is the most important part of the budget, the green box titled Total Cash Savings Ability (to the right of the expenses section) is how much I anticipate we will be able to add to our cash reserves on top of our retirement contributions. Some years we increased our cash position by $30k or more. Nowadays we’re hoping to add just a smidge over $10,000 to our liquidity. It’s a good thing we don’t use our Net Worth to measure our actual worth.
Goals:
In the top right of the spreadsheet you will see a section for my annual financial predictions. In 2015 I’m hoping our overall Net Worth will increase to about $315,000. This would be a $27,000 increase from our current position. For my retirement accounts I’m estimating 7% growth over the year (2013 had like 25% growth while 2014 had 6.5%) and a 3% appreciation on our house. Obviously, if the markets do way better (or worse) these figures will be off. All I can do is guess.
We’re going on six years of solid improvement and as long as the Big Man upstairs continues to grant us a generous income, we’ll do our best to be responsible (and generous) with it. That’s really our only goal after all.
How do you budget? You do budget right? Anything I do with mine that you think is weird? What’s your preferred budgeting tool (Mint, Quicken, Excel, Paper/pencil)?
Oh and check out this awesome video of Baby Ninja and I beatboxing together…
