We Had a Baby!! | January 2025 Beers & Budgeting

We are back. We thought we would be able to film December and January back to back and that did not happen because you know life and kids and babies and yeah. But here we are. We're going to be doing January's budget so stick around. Hey guys welcome back to the channel. I'm your host Justine and this is my husband Kyle. What's up? And we are going to go over our January budget for 2025. First month of the new year. Lots of new updates but first a beer. A beer. So what are we drinking? I was missing California and I saw this one on the shelf and it reminded me of San Diego who used to go to this brewery called Belching Beaver. And I don't know what other beers they make but the only one that everyone knows about is their peanut butter porter. And so I saw this one on the shelf from Denver Beer Co. So not Belching Beaver. So not Belching Beaver because that was in San Diego. Right. This is the memory beer and it's a peanut butter graham cracker porter. So and I was like oh I mean that's it. Like these are the kind of beers where you have one and that's it. You're not going to be playing beer pong with these things. So anyways I pre-poured them into glasses because you know we got to get other stuff done today. So and it's the last one. Cheers. Cheers. Oh my gosh. Yeah it's like a dessert. I really like it. Yeah it's like a dessert. I mean all beer is technically. Let's talk you know let's not lie. But this one is very sweet and it's a little thick and kind of like how I like my wife. Sweet and a little thick? I would never describe my body type as a little thick. No not even close. But I was stretching for a joke and it didn't work but. You tried. I tried. What happened in January? Oh my gosh we finally had our baby. Yeah. And by we I mean me. Because let's be honest I did that all that. Yeah. All that hard work. Yep I didn't. I rubbed her back and held her hand. Oh I didn't even do that. Okay well my best friend Lauren watched and she um was amazed by the miracle of birth. Let's just say that. Uh we kind of talked about it last last beers and budgeting episode. It was an amazing birth. I do plan on making some sort of video talking about her birth story the birth experience because I think that's important. And we got the bill. This is a financial channel. We got that hospital bill. We did. Should we share that? No I'll save it for the video. Okay. They don't care here. Oh I think they do. I think they do because we're we're gonna have to somehow pay for that out of pocket. Uh which is with our health savings account but more on that later. I think that should be a separate video about hospital bills and how much you pay to give birth in a U.S. based hospital. But we'll get into our January budget first. Let's do it. And with every new budget, every new yearly budget I should say, I start a completely new spreadsheet file. So I don't have months and years and years in one file. This is a new spreadsheet file. This is the super budget template that I am showing in this window. You can also use the simple template which is here. The simple template is part of the free budget toolkit. You can go to debtfreemillennials.com toolkit to get this particular template. If you want the super one, which is what I'm using here for January, that is a paid template that is for sale using the link below. So super budget template. What I like about this one is just got more bells and whistles and more charting, more reporting. So if you're wanting an upgrade on your budget template then this is the one to use. So let's talk about, we always kind of do a summary and we can go through the notes. So we plan on a $13,000 income. I did bump that up from like the previous two, three years where we were budgeting for an $11,000 month. I'm like, realistically, we haven't really had that month in a long, long time. So I have been paying myself now in owner's draw from my business. That's nice. That's nice. That feels, that feels what I, yeah, I had a really great year in business last year. So this year, I don't know. And I'm not trying to put pressure on myself for that because I'm on maternity leave. It's a baby year. So we have quite a bit of money left over. $5,686. Yeah. So we need to kind of figure out what we're doing with that. One of the reasons why we kind of kept things the way they are is because we had a baby. We didn't know what kind of expenses were needed. Was she going to be healthy? You know, all that stuff. Yeah. So I did say at the beginning of the month, have a baby. And then at the end of the month, survive the first month of having a baby. Which we did. We did. Remarkably well. I had to say you did remarkably well. I helped out for like a week and then you were like, I got this. I was like, okay. Okay. Explain to the kids. What do you, what do you mean by that? It's the whole middle of the night breastfeeding versus bottle, you know, you know, cage match that, you know, people seem to have online and just getting the baby used to things and all that stuff. This baby was almost twice the size as our first baby. Um, no, I'm exaggerating just a little bit. Uh, and that made things so much easier because this one really is only beginning up two times during the night since day two. Yeah. I would even call it like once in the middle. Yeah. And so it's really fairly convenient. So what we've been doing is Justine gets up with the newborn and then I get up with the older kid. So Justine can go back to sleep and then I get up and get her ready to take her to school and all that stuff. So it's been a good trade off and it works for us. And really as a parents, like that should be the rule that trumps all other rules is whatever works for you is what's right. So most of you can take it and shove it. If you have any other opinion. Okay. That's all right. That's how strongly I feel about that. Cause if it works for you, then you're doing it right. So January is going to be kind of a different month for us. It's going to be a birthday month for us here on out. Cause Lucy was born in January. Um, my dad's birthday is also in January, but in terms of us planning parties and spending money and stuff here on out, like January is a birthday month. Yeah. March is a birthday month. All that good stuff. I put some notes in here that now that we have Lucy's social security and stuff, we can open a five 29 plan for her. I want to check the health insurance deductible and make sure whatever the hospital billed us is now communicated on our, uh, insurance portal because 2025 is the year of medical everything. We hit that deductible. We want to get every doctor's appointment in while we've basically only have to pay what like 20% where everything there's certain things that are covered a hundred percent. So get it done. This is my opinion and yours too. Yeah. Yeah. You're excited about doctor's appointments. Aren't you? I love them. Doesn't everybody. Okay. So I'm looking at the mortgage. Yeah. How is this balance not going down? I'm so frustrated that we've dropped like what feels like 30 K already and it still hasn't budged. Yeah. Is it really just front loaded with that much interest? Yes, it is. What a piece of shit set up. So 87% of our mortgage payment is currently going towards the interest. And we took out our mortgage. The loan we took out was originally 512,000 and now it's just under five Oh six. And we took that loan out in July, June, June of last year. So yeah, we want to change how our mortgage is paid. But of course, when I went into the portal, the mortgage portal, I went to go change the auto automatic payment to bi-weekly and it said, Oh, you can't do that. You have to call us first. I'm sure because they're making more money on the interest by having us pay just lump sum first of the month. Yeah. But we're going to try to change that. That's on, that should be on my little to-do list. Add a little odds and ends. Change how mortgage is paid. Well, I have, I have like a weekly task list, you know, while I'm on maternity leave, you're like, you're on maternity leave. You should just be chilling. With that said though, we, we do want to get rid of that debt as quickly as possible. The reason that we're not, you know, throwing all this extra money at it is because of the plan expenses we have coming up. We have a retaining wall in the backyard that needs to be finished because it's holding up that little retaining wall that we need to pay for is holding up like a hundred thousand dollar retaining wall that was put in a decade ago. So that's kind of crucial. Then we also have a nanny expenses coming up, two kids in daycare coming up, you know? So for the next couple of years, it's like, I feel like I need a more bigger safety net to plan for those bigger expenses. And it's like, maybe I pause some of the extra retirement contribution to, you know, help pay for the nannies in the daycares. And then when the kids are out of daycare and they're in school, you know, normal school or lower cost school or whatever they're in at that point, cause I don't know what's happening to the department of education right now. Then, then, then we can dump all the extra money in my mind towards that debt at 7%. Yeah. If that interest rate goes back down and we get, somehow we refi to a 3%, if something happens, I don't think that's going to happen. Then I wouldn't attack it as hard, but with it at 7% in the next couple of years, I want to get that. There's that. We haven't even gotten, let's get into the rest of our stuff. Okay. Here's our fixed expenses. The fixed expenses are all of the things that we know that we pay for every single month. Basically preschool, all of our utilities, our utilities, our water is paid every other month. It is not $175 every single month. Got ahead of my question. Yep. So we should be budgeting around 55 to $60 per month. $60? No, that's not right. What is this? That's $85, $87.50. I'm so sleep deprived. I can't even divide by two. $80 per month for water. That would be $160. Yeah. So, okay. So a little bit more than that. Yeah. So we need to be budgeting for that half of that every single month, essentially. All of our different insurances. We paid our CPA this month technically to do our taxes, which that's on my to-do list is get all the tax stocks over to him. I'm starting to get emails. I think a lot of things are due February 1st or February sometime. Yeah. Mid-February, a lot of the investment companies roll out their 1099 div forms, the interest forms, the INT forms. So we've got all that. Our home improvement and repairs, like the home depots, trips, things like that, spent $330 in January for that. And then we've been creating a sinking fund. So we've got 800 bucks for home improvement and repairs. Let's go down to fun. We actually do really good on restaurants. $350 on restaurants. We didn't go out a lot because people were bringing us casseroles with newborn phase. And that was really nice. So nice. My best friend, Lauren made us a ton of meals. Your mom made us a ton of meals. It just, it was, my parents came over and cooked for us. Like it was just so nice and did Costco runs for us. So that's really, really helpful. If you are ever wondering what to give a family with a newborn food is an easy food, not a DoorDash gift card, make a casserole, something simple, tuna noodle casserole. I don't care. And just take it over there. Cause the problem is with DoorDash and being in the newborn phase, when you finally realize that you're hungry, you're hungry at that moment. And then with DoorDash, you're like, that'll be easy. No. Cause then you have to pick a place and then you have to pick something off the menu and then you have to wait for it to be delivered. And then it's been an hour. And at that point, everyone's hangry, including the kid or kids or whoever and stuff. So if you can, I mean, if it's geographically, that's somewhat difficult, right? Yeah. If you're a thousand miles away from your friends, yes. Give them a DoorDash gift card. We will take that too. But if you're a thousand feet from your friends, make a meal, take it over. They'll love you for it. It's a huge deal. Yeah, it really is. Shopping was $700, but we will actually, we should go down here too. Because we bought a whole bunch of stuff off of Amazon and different little things for the house. So we got like the humidifiers because it's been so dry here. We got a space heater. We got basement lights. Oh man, I'm loving everything on this list right now. We got Roku speakers. Okay. So it was a lot of things for the house that we were like, Oh yeah, we, we wanted to switch that out. So I didn't put like basement lights in home improvement repairs. Although I guess it is an improvement. Yeah. So what about all the things I bought for the gym? Like, does that go in home improvement or gym Roku? If it was, if it all the wood to build this stuff. Oh yeah. If it was a Home Depot thing, then it was just automatically categorized as home improvement. Okay. Like all of these boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo. Except for this, why is $500 home upgrade home upgrades for $522? Is that the toilets? Oh, that is the toilets. We bought new toilets. Our old toilets were like the size of a solo cup and about the same height off the ground. So it's about like being in Thailand. The ultimate squatty potty. No, it wasn't, it wasn't that bad, but yeah, they were old. Yeah. So I'm curious what this is going to do for our water bill. Yeah. Cause the new ones we got are these high efficiency, low water flush things that are nice. They are nice. And you know, you go from being in college, you know, thinking about lots of different things to then having an opinion about toilets. Oh yeah. And it's weird how life changes. It's super millennial. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's fantastic. It's nice. It's very nice. So that was shopping in a nutshell, fun money. We had spent a little bit on looks like we spent a little bit of money for you on clothes, like new, really nice pair of sweat pants, um, and a pullover feel like there is something else that got for you shoes, shoes, shoes, yep. Tennis shoes. So all of that beautiful, I am that cheap. I got sweat pants, a nice quarter zip and a pair of shoes for 122 bucks. I mean, I'm super high maintenance y'all. No, they were nice. Like the sweat pants and the pullover were from Abercrombie, but you just shop the sales shop sales guys. So Quinn money, Lucy money. We have a pop pots for both of them. I think I bought Quinn some, uh, new clothes, some sweat pants and stuff. This is just so cold. Oh, but something that we did not tell everybody was we hired a cleaning service. And so now we've, this is February was the third time that they've come through. So now we're budgeting about $300 per month for a once a month. So worth it. People that grow up, they grew up with like, Oh, I cleaned that. We cleaned the house. That was part of the chores. It was part of all that stuff. And I was like, there's no reason to hire cleaners. Yes, there is like with two kids and it's just her and I, and you know, working full time, I don't have time to clean everything all the time. And it's just so nice and convenient and getting my time back, getting the evening back with the kids and the wife and getting weekends back to go do things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I talked about this on Instagram because I was curious to see how many people actually hire a cleaning service versus doing it themselves. I was amazed half of the people had responded that they hired a cleaning service and I didn't realize how many people actually outsource that because like you, I grew up in a household where we're cleaning. Mom's literally vacuuming my bedroom at 8 AM on a Saturday morning while I'm still in bed sleeping and then getting us up and making us to clean our bathroom. As the girls get older, they will be forced to clean the house. Yeah. It teaches you good work ethic and to organize and keep your stuff tidy. I think I learned that lesson, especially my first year in college. It's like, Oh wow. Yeah. Yeah. When you start to live with other people, it's like, yeah, okay. I'm going to, my laundry kind of stinks. Maybe I should do it. Or just like, I don't want your stuff around my stuff. So you start picking up your things. You're still I am, we keep our laundry separated. He does his laundry. I do my laundry. It's mostly because it's the long hair. It's the long hair. Like the three times that I've thrown my laundry in with yours end up like getting some long hair in my jockeys. And then I'm like, what is this? And you know, none of that. So yeah, we do our laundry separate now. Yeah. It's when, when it's cleaning day, we're like, Ooh, cleaning day. This is so nice. It feels like walking into a hotel. They do very intricate folds with the toilet paper and our towels. And it's like a resort for 30 minutes until Quinn comes home and then destroys the place. But in those 30 minutes, I'm telling you Okay. So that's our spiel on cleaning stuff. Let's go over future and savings and things like that. Cause we spent money on home upgrades, $1,800 in home upgrades. Let me go down here and take a look at exactly what we did. Oh yeah. Okay. So you, you bought an office chair. Oh yeah. Yeah. We bought the toilets and then this line item here is what we actually saved. Okay. So I think I need a different way, a different system on how we're saving for things while using a sinking fund, like reflecting how a sinking fund is used inside of this template because we spent $847. So what I could do, we set aside a thousand, we spent 847. We had $152 left over. That's how that worked. Still saving for the car fund. We've got about $2,500 in that vacation fund is sitting at about $4,700. Quinn's college fund is almost $12,000 guys. And she's not even four years old. So, and then we talked about doing, I said, baby number two. Now you guys get to know her name. Lou's college fund, uh, will be started. That should be on my little weekly admin thing. Things I do while she naps while she sleeps. That's that list. Yeah. Okay. Uh, some people were talking about wanting to know more about our investments and whatnot. So I in savings. And so I included an emergency fund right here. We're sitting at just under $40,000 in our emergency fund savings. That is in a high yield savings account. And we don't touch that money in less. It's truly for emergency purposes. I went ahead and started adding in some investments because I think a handful of you guys were like, what about your investments? We want to know what the updates are. So I did all of my retirement accounts that you can see pretty much these three here, the traditional step in Roth have all increased over time. Like they've just gotten bigger and bigger. The brokerage account, this is with Vanguard. The brokerage account was a way for Kyle and I to save for a down payment or whatever we wanted. This is our, whatever we want money. We never actually pulled money out of this account because we pulled money from other sources. So we still have about 58 K in that brokerage account news to me. So there you go. Uh, my Robin hood account has about 5,800. Yours has significantly more. We'll just call it this $15,376. And you had pulled money out of this account. Yeah, it was about 30,000 and I pulled money out of it to pay for our kitchen. That's right. Yep. Yep. Okay. That was all money that I made playing in the stock market. That's crazy. So yeah, that was kind of fun. That is really fun. Uh, okay. Stash. Oh, um, I haven't checked stash in a while. I need to update it. So let's just update everybody next time. Okay. Unless it's going to do it quick. I don't know. Is there, are they really charging us $3 a month? Is that a real thing? I need to look into that because if they, yeah, if they are, then I kind of want to get rid of it. Cause they don't have enough money in there to offset a $3 a month balance, $36 a year. Uh, you know, that's taken away a large percentage of the gains. If you had, you know, $10,000 in there, then it's a pretty good deal. But from the money I have in there, that's not, not worth it in my opinion. But anyways, we'll update you all next time on what we do with stash. I like stash. If it's a platform that you want to get behind or whatever, all about it. Nice. Uh, I do need your most recent pay stubs so I can see exactly how much we're paying per paycheck in our different deductions. You could add life insurance to that too. And your retirement, I know you're still, you're still technically maxing out your retirement, right? And then some. Cause we had talked about too, do, does Kyle pull back on retirement in order for us to add in the nanny expense temporarily? I mean, at this point we don't need to because we still have money left over even in our, our planned budget of 13 K we still have money for a nanny, but we're just not entirely sure what that's going to look like in Kansas, in San Diego. We knew what that amount was, but maybe it's different here. I'm not really sure. Okay. Stash. Yeah. It really doesn't have a lot of money. It's play money. It's just under $2,000. Okay. So this isn't our entire investment portfolio, right? Like Kyle still has his 401k still have TSP from the previous job. And there's still a Charles Schwab account. There's still. Oh yeah. Charles Schwab. I totally forgot about that. I know we sound, we sound pretty stupid. No, we're not. Yeah, we do. Oh yeah. I forgot about that other account. He's got a couple thousand bucks. No, no, no, no. Everything is prices and crap right now are going nuts. We sound like we're just everything. All of our investments are accounted for in projection lab. Projection lab is a financial planning simulator tool that you can use. It's cool tool. And it basically is a net worth tracker. It's a financial planning tractor to see how much your net worth is going to be. Once you retire, if you want to retire early, you can plan for that using that tool. Um, that's always linked below, by the way, if you're interested in checking that out, there is a free version. It does not save your data. There is a paid version that does save your data. So you can track that over time. Um, and I am an affiliate for, because I love it. And if you want to do one-on-one coaching with me, I provide your subscription free of charge for you during our coaching program. So if you want to check that out, you absolutely can. I'm going to take the next cohort in probably April, mid to late April. I'm going to start up the next cohort of one-on-one coaching clients. So if you're, if you are interested in my coaching program, you can check that out on my website at freemillennials.com and just click on services and look at one-on-one coaching. We talked about what are we gonna do with that money? I think we, I think we got to save it for the retaining wall and the nanny fund. Subscribe, hit the like button. See you later. Um, that is January. Happy to be here. Happy to not be pregnant. Did I mention that in the last episode? I was so happy that I'm not pregnant anymore. Me too. So I can do things like this and do things like this and it doesn't hurt. You mean walk across the house? Walking at a brisk pace, anything really bending over, squatting over. Okay. Y'all, uh, we hope you have a wonderful day, night, weekend, whenever you're watching this. And, um, yes, do all those things that he mentioned and we'll see you next month. Bye. Fantastico. Super duper. Yeah.