November was an OK but unspectacular month. It was fraught with a couple challenges, namely my stupid temper which led to me breaking my flip phone and having to spend $144 on the replacement and fend off a slew of add-ons to the monthly bill that I did not authorize that the idiot in-store rep signed me up for without my permission, but my $39/month phone bill remains intact after much haranguing. But other than that, I am most proud of spending $0 on work related expenses for the entire month! I brought lunch from home every single day, took public transit enough that the tank of gas I bought in October is still 1/4 full, and avoided tolls entirely. Sadly, I can't say the same for December so far, but it was nice in that regard.
Overtime is still non-existent at work, but thankfully my pretax savings do not depend on overtime...another month, but this one had three pay periods in it, so $1500 went into my pretax accounts instead of the usual $1000, which is nice. Can't wait for the big retro check coming whenever our raises go through, which I'll be directing 80% of to the pretax account anyway, but that will be a nice small boost to my net possessions.
I added some more money into my brokerage account, picking up defensive stocks mainly on weakness, as I continue to split my savings between individual quality dividend stocks and indexing. The early returns on investing in the municipal bond fund through Vanguard seem promising - the $3000 I invested last month has already paid its first dividend, and will yield over $100 annually for life, tax free. I am excited to continue to contribute a portion of my savings each year to this fund to see how it grows. With volatility in the markets, I am trying to be more cautious in general since I know I can't time the market, but trying to get in on small dips when I can. Honestly, I'm probably done contributing for a bit, because I need to start setting aside the 5500 to put into my Roth in the spring as a 2017 contribution, and I don't want to dip into the emergency fund to pay for it. The net possessions number posted below looks nice, but I attribute that mainly to a friendly last few days of market trading sessions rather than to some genius Mustachian techniques or tendencies on my part, and those gains have already disappeared in December, so I'm evaluating my November performance mainly on my savings rate. I smooth my takehome income so I don't get a false sense of security in three-pay-cycle months (like November 2018), so I estimate using this method that my savings rate in November was a pedestrian 41.4% of takehome pay (which also includes already paid costs that I amortize over the "contract period" like vehicle registration, insurances, etc). Several of those (including the phone) were one time items, without which I would have saved over 50%, but I can't discount them, that's not the way this works, they're spending. I prefer to amortize because it allows me to derive more meaningful conclusions about my spending when comparing different months, as well as track my cost increases better when prices for spending items rise.
The elephant in the room is house upgrades. The basement project has turned into a nightmare, and we are leaning towards just getting it done sooner for peace of mind and to get the square footage back so we can put things away properly. We continue to slowly progress through clutter disposal and Craigslist/eBay sales of items that have value, but there's still more than we like. Re: basement - we will do as much of the work ourselves as we can, but it's going to be a hefty bill regardless - mainly because one of the non load bearing walls has become load bearing over time as the house has settled on it. In the meantime, December's budget figures to be below my usual standard with holiday expenses, a trip to visit family planned (even though we'll be driving and staying with them to minimize cost), and an oil tank refill looming as well. We've been keeping the thermostat at a brisk 63 so far. After I finish insulating more of the basement steam pipes, we will probably bump that to 64 for the coldest part of the winter. But electric bills have been running around $130 monthly of late, which is far better than years previous as we've been more conscious of our energy use this year.
So my fortunes will remain heavily tied to the market through year end.
On the plus side, I really haven't sold many winning investments this year, so that should help keep the tax bill low through deducting capital losses, and I have to see where I stand on my conversion of my IRA to Roth from the spring re: taxes, since I know that will add some expense, but I'm hoping lower marginal rates will help in that regard. We live in a high tax state, however, so how the new limits on deductions will play out for us is anyone's guess. I'm hoping there's a refund that I can throw into savings coming my way, although obviously the benefit of that won't be until next year.
December 2014: $89,173 (I don't have the exact date I hit 100K, so including this here anyway)
December 2015: $106,299
December 2016: $147,449
December 2017: $182,600
June 2018: $217,065
July 2018: $221,250
August 2018: 222,274
September 2018: 224,569
October 2018: 220,241
November 2018: 226,052
Topic: Race from 100 to 250k (Read 1360868 times)
