It’s budget update time! I always look forward to going through our budget at the end of the month and planning our budget for the next month.
When we look at our budget at the end of the month, we aren’t looking to see if we matched our spending up exactly with the amount we set for each budget category. This is an important difference from the way budget is often approached. The idea that spending must be kept within the exact parameters set on the first day of the month is silly and makes people feel like budgeting failures.
Instead, throughout the month we track our spending as we go (so there aren’t any big surprises) and we move money around between categories as needed. Making changes to your original plan is part of the process, not a sign of failure.
At the end of the month we can put any extra funds from our regular categories towards the financial goal that we’re working on. It’s also the time that we make plans for the next month.
Making plans for what we need our money to do for us each month allows us to prioritize what is most important to us and helps us to reach our financial goals.
Here’s what our spending and earning looked like in March.
Spending in March
When we first understood the concept of living on last month’s income, it rocked our financial world in the best kind of way. If you have no idea what that means, here’s a video walk-through. Or you can read up on how you can get started.
At the beginning of each month, we start budgeting by first adding up the income we earned the month before. In March, we budget and spend what we earned in February. We knew on March 1st exactly how much money we had to work with during the month. So on March 1st, we start the March budget by taking everything we earned in February and assigning it to our March budget categories.
We can’t see the future, so on the first of March, these dollar assignments were really just our best guesses and goals. We’ve been doing this for years and can make some pretty good guesses, but every month is different. Our dollar assignments at the beginning of the month almost never stay exactly the same because our needs and priorities usually change during a month. And a budget that changes during the month is good!
It’s normal for our spending plan to change as we move through the month. The important thing isn’t spending exactly how much we guessed we might spend in each budget area at the beginning of the month. It would be silly to let our March 1st guesses dictate what we can and can’t do all during the month. The important thing is to not spend more total in March than we earned in February.
If we need to spend more in one budget category than we had originally assigned, that money has to come from some other budget category. We revise the budget categories to meet our priorities during the month, but we can’t just add more money to all of them, because the total amount stays the same all month long. A changed budget is not a failed budget. A budget needs to be flexible in order to be successful!
Here’s our family’s final March spending for all of our budget categories.
Giving
Tithing – $1,347 We start out the month paying a 10% tithe on our income. Like all of our March spending, our tithing is calculated on what we earned in February. We often get questions about this. You can read our thoughts on tithing here.
Fast Offering – $100 Each month we take one day to go without food and drink (fasting) and contribute to a program that helps people who need it.
Monthly Bills
Mortgage – $3,000 Our actual mortgage bill each month is $2,525 but we round up any pay an even $3,000. This shaves two years off of our mortgage and saves us over $4,000 in interest. If you’re new here, we have a 15-year mortgage on our 2200 sq ft house in Northern California. We’re so thankful to have locked in our mortgage interest rate at 2.375% when we refinanced in December of 2020 (all of the details and numbers are here.) We currently have $155,470 remaining on our mortgage.
I updated the goal tracker house (you can get your own copy in my shop)!
Electricity – $6 Two years ago we installed solar panels on our property, a $70,000 investment that we finished paying for last year. Our electric bill is just the $6 unavoidable fee.
Car Insurance – $362 We have three vehicles with two adult drivers and one teen driver, soon to be adding another teen driver.
Internet – $124 We have cable internet through Comcast. When we bought our home eight years ago, we invested $5,000 to have Comcast extend cable internet to our property. It has been worth it every single day since then, even though the cost for internet service went up recently.
Water – $49 Our water bill comes every other month. We had set aside $100 last month, so we only needed $49 to have enough for the March bill.
Garbage- $53 Like the water bill, our trash pick-up bill comes every other month, so each month I set aside the money for half of the bill. The cost on this service recently increased, too.
Cell Phones – $175 We pay for eight cell phones: five for our family, and three for the Ukrainian family that we sponsor. Mike is trying out the annual plan, so we now only pay 7 phone bills per month). Our phones are all through Visible. Visible is a Verizon subsidiary that offers no-contract plans with wifi calling, unlimited cell calls, and unlimited data on the Verizon network. We’ve been using them for years. You can’t beat paying just $25 per phone each month with unlimited data.
Gym – $60 For the first time in our lives, we joined a gym this year. Our teenagers were extra excited, since it’s a small local gym that many of their friends go to. We have been going early nearly every morning. We hope that investing in our fitness now will make life better now and for years into the future.
Everyday Expenses
Food – $686 I did a good job at sticking with the 4 things I said I’d do in March to lower our grocery spending and it paid off. If you need help getting your grocery spending under control, you can learn all about my strategies and method in my Grocery Budget Hero online course. Right now it’s available with pay-what-you-can pricing!
Fuel – $552 Getting our Prius was a game changer for our gas budget. We drive it whenever we’re going somewhere with 5 or fewer people. We still have our 15-passenger van, but we don’t need to use it very often. We often take both the minivan and the Prius when we are all going somewhere close.
Household Misc – $610 We had a more expensive month for household miscellaneous. In addition to normal toiletries and household things, we stocked up on about $60 of postage stamps because I couldn’t find all of our stamps (then two weeks later I found them). Hooray for Forever stamps! We got combination carbon monoxide detector/smoke alarms that are wireless and interconnected. We had our normal subscriptions like Google Suite ($6), CrashPlan ($30), Adobe Lightroom ($20), Scribd/Everand ($12), and Sadie Active ($10). We got a couple of pairs of glasses (including prescription sunglasses) from Zenni. We also paif for parking in Sacramento a couple of times.
Clothing – $172 – I got some shoes of my 7th grader and ordered some summer clothes.
Animals – $0 We didn’t need to buy any animal food in March.
Allowances – $143 We give our kids “practice money” as a weekly allowance. You can read all about why we decided to pay our kids allowance that’s not directly tied to chores, as well as all the details of when and how much in this blog post.
Sports – $87 Most of this was spent on printing photos for the high school basketball banquet (Mike likes taking pictures at the games). We also got some kneepads for volleyball and paid for entrance to an away volleyball game.
Sinking Funds
For our regular budget categories above, we take out any funds that are still left at the end of the month and send them toward our big financial goal. For example, if we started the month with $800 in our food budget category, but only used $720 of that, the other $80 would go toward our current major financial goal. Focusing all these extra funds from each category into one goal helped us pay off our law school debt years earlier than we thought possible.
In contrast to the regular budget categories above that we zero out each month, we also put money into the categories below. These are our sinking funds. Our sinking funds are categories where we set aside money for periodic expenses each month and let it roll over and build up until we need it. I recently wrote a whole article about how to get started using sinking funds (and why you should).
The amount in bold is the amount we added to the fund this month, followed by spending notes and the current balance of each fund.
To answer a question we often get, we do not have separate bank accounts for these funds. We had separate accounts many years ago when we first started budgeting but we learned that was overkill. Instead, all of the money sits in our checking account. Since we spend according to our budget category balances, not our checking account balance, we’re not worried about getting the money mixed up. We seriously never even look at our checking account balance unless we’re reconciling the account. We track our budget categories and spending in YNAB, a budgeting tool we absolutely adore. Yes, you can adore a budgeting tool. Don’t believe me? Try it out. If you have been using Mint or something similar to manage your finances, you’ll want to read about our switch to budgeting with YNAB.
Medical/Dental – $500 added. We spent $71 on orthodontics in March. Current category balance is $955
Car Maintenance – $400 added. In March we got an oil change on the Prius and bought a new cabin air filter that Mike will install himself.. Current category balance is $734.
Christmas – $200 added. In March I got this for one of our kids for Christmas 2025. Now we just have to resist giving it to him before then! Current category balance is $522.
Disability Insurance- $190 added We set aside money each month for disability insurance so that when the annual premium is due we have the money ready. If Mike is unable to do his work as an attorney due to illness or injury, this disability insurance will replace about 60% of his current income. Since our income potential is our greatest financial asset right now, we have disability insurance to help us protect it. We paid the balance in March and are now saving for next year. Current category balance is $152.
Life Insurance – $100 added. Our life insurance premiums are due each November, so we set aside a portion of the estimated total each month which will go toward next year’s premium. Current category balance is $422.
Birthdays & Gifts – $50 added. We spent $28 on a gift in March. Current category balance is $52.
Car Registration & Smog – $50 added. We didn’t spend anything in March. Current category balance is $342.
Family Fun Fund – $100 added. I took four of the kids to the MOSAC museum in Sacramento on a homeschool day. Mine admission and that of my youngest were paid for my his homesschool charter, but I paid $39 for the other 3 kids. Current category balance is $71.
Home and Garden – $0 added. We didn’t spend anything in this category. Current category balance is $30.
Big Trips – $0 added. In March, we spent $244 on booking an Airbnb the night before our cruise. I wrote in detail about how we’re saving for this trip creatively without using our own money. We’ve already paid for our cruise, so the rest of this for everything else like the drive down to Long Beach, the parking garage, excursions, and spending money on shore. Current category balance is $989.
Investing
Kids’ 529s – $150 added. Investing just $25 per child per month for college isn’t much, but we are okay with that. Neither of us had much college savings when we went to college, but with scholarships, grants, loans, and jobs during school we were able to get our undergraduate degrees without debt. We may contribute more later, but right now we’re happy with small, consistent contributions. I looked at the balances recently and was pleased to see that this small contribution that is barely noticeable in our monthly budget has added up and grown to over $21,000! If you want to know more you can read about how we decided to start 529s for our kids.
IRA (Steph) – $583 added. With this same amount each month, I will reach my $7,000 IRA contribution for 2025. Mike has about $1,300 each month deducted directly from his paycheck into the state pension fund and a 457 plan for his retirement.
Income Earned in March- $10,056
The categories above show everything we spent and saved in March, which was all the money we had earned in January. At the same time we were also (of course) earning money during February. At the beginning of March, we set up our budget to allocate spending from our February income.
This concept of getting a month ahead, has made such a huge impact on our finances! It takes some work to get to the point where you are living on last month’s income, but the effort is completely worth it!
The income section below shows the money we earned in March, which we will use during April.
Attorney Income – $9,094 Mike works as an attorney for the state of California. This was his take-home pay after taxes, social security, his pension contribution, and health insurance premiums.
Rental Income – $0 For years we rented out a one-bedroom apartment on our property through Airbnb. We gave that up to take in a Ukrainian refugee family for a couple of years. We loved Airbnb and will likely go back to that in the future. If you’re thinking about renting out your space on Airbnb, check out this post where I talk about how much you can make on Airbnb.
Law Firm- $0 Before working for the state, Mike did estate planning and business transactional work. Over the last few years he has had a steady stream of potential clients, most of whom he refers to other attorneys, but he still occasionally helps former clients. He doesn’t write himself a paycheck each month, just a couple of times a year.
Blog – $0 I only pay myself a few times a year now. My blogging income took a major hit when I put the blog on the back burner during Covid to start homeschooling my kids. It is slowly recovering as I put more effort into posting regularly and all of the things I do behind the scenes. Thankfully the income still covers my fixed blogging expenses (which are a lot more than most people would guess) and allows me to pay myself a few times a year.
Child Care – $772 For the past year I have been taking care of the 3-year-old of the Ukrainian family that we sponsor. The state pays for childcare while the mom is at work. It’s much less expensive and more convenient to have her stay with me than to bring her to a standalone child care facility.
Tax Refund – $190 We really weren’t sure if we were going to have to pay this year or not. We finished up using our solar tax credit (more on that here) and had to change Mike’s withholding back to normal at work, plus with our self-employment taxes we weren’t sure how things would shake out. We ended up not owing, but instead getting a bit of a refund. This is rom our federal return.
Come back next month to see how we used this income to spend and save in April’s budget.
How’s Your Budget Working for YOU!?
That was a lot of words and numbers! Congratulations for making it all the way through our March 2025 family budget update!
Now we would love to hear from you!
Any questions on what or why we spend what we do?
What are your current financial goals?
Do you find that your budget is helping you reach your goals, or is it not working like you wish it was?
Let’s chat in the comments!
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