@Sanitary Engineer Thanks for responding! Three kids under four is no joke! We only had three under five for a few months. It's great that you are thinking about these things while your kids are so young. I spent a few years in a complete daze and just came up for air when my youngest turned four.
You bring up lots of great points. My husband will love the idea of an annual budget. I had to stop him from over-engineering the budget, so we settled on ynab, but now that we've been tracking for a few months we can add an annual plan. I was afraid we would never get started if we made it too complicated at the beginning. But we do have a lot of annual expenses that aren't reflected in our regular monthly expenses, and those are hard to account for in a monthly budget.
Vehicle costs: I'm glad you brought up vehicle registration, because that reminded me that mine is expiring on the 31st, so I have to go get the emissions testing done. That is about a $45 expense between the testing and the actual registration, so we just use the misc. budget category for things like that. But we do need to include car maintenance, especially as my minivan is 9 years old and will need work eventually.
Pets: there are some expenses there, but they are pretty minimal. My brother is a vet tech, and he gets us a discount for vet care and the flea/heartworm meds as samples or at cost. We trade pet sitting with our neighbor, so they aren't ever boarded. We don't plan to have expensive procedures done for them. (That might sound cold-hearted. I know some people view pets differently, but we give them good lives and have them put down when they have major issues.)
Health insurance: we have a high deductible plan, and we pay out of pocket costs from the HSA, although now I'm hearing that maybe we should use the HSA differently, so I'll have to think about that.
Utilities: they are actually even higher than I recorded--ack! In October, we paid electric, gas, and water/sewer bills of 401.63.
There are two issues. One is that our house is very large. It is 3000 sq ft, and the main part of the house was built in the 1920s, and is drafty. The second issue is that we've had my brother and his fiancee living with us for the past year in the 400 sq ft. apartment on the back of our house. Adding two adults has added about 100 to our utilities. But they are moving out next weekend, so I'm expecting our utilities to gradually go back down (the electric is averaged throughout the year, so it will take a few months to decrease). Garbage/recycling is a yearly 200 fee that is part of our property tax bill.
Streaming/subscriptions: I also feel like I must be forgetting some, but I've looked back through my records and think this is it.
We have:
spotify: 10.93
amazon prime: 119/12 months= 9.92/month
yousician (music lessons app): 14.99
github (no idea what this is--something tech related): 7
public library: 50/12 months= 4.17/month
total: 47.01
Sometimes we'll get an extra Amazon channel for a month if there is something we want to watch. I think my husband did get a year of the Headspace meditation app, but I'm not sure if he'll renew it. We used to have a lot more subscriptions, but we went through and cancelled the ones we weren't really using. (And we cancelled Netflix, which the kids were using, but they have survived.)
I do have a huge home library (a few thousand books), but I am trying to only buy books by selling some to the used bookstore and getting other books with the store credit.
Thanks for the tip about the ssa website. I knew you could estimate retirement benefits, but I didn't know you could do that with survivor benefits.
I've been meaning to start composting anyway, so that would work well to gauge the food waste. We do cook simple meals without recipes, for the most part. There is *ahem* a lot of alcohol in that budget. But the food part is also too high. Our girls are athletes and eat like grown men, but we do buy too many snacks, and we tend to buy instead of make food to bring to potlucks and things like that. We also host a lot of friends and family for meals, but they are perfectly happy with simple foods and we need to be making pots of chili instead of cheese plates and burgers for a crowd. $500/month seems impossible, but I'll aim for 800 and then revisit.
You are right that this budget is missing things. We've made a lot of changes recently, and I'm sure we're forgetting expenses, especially sporadic ones. Hopefully if I can get the grocery budget down, that savings will cover some of them. It seems like a crazy dream for him to retire in ten years, but I'm excited about the possibility. I'm going to check out that calculator.
Thanks again for all the ideas and suggestions!