Did We Really Spend $155K in Just One Year? Let's Review!

We spent $155,000 in one year. What? Today we are sharing what we spent and what income we brought in for 2025. This is my husband, Kyle. Sup? This is a special year-end budget review, so we're drinking a beer along with it. Let's start with the total picture summary. For our total income, we brought in $179,000 for the year. This is our take-home, after taxes, deductions, and insurance premiums that we pay out of mainly Kyle's paycheck because he's the W-2 earner and I'm self-employed. That equates to about $15,000 every single month. And our monthly expenses totaled $155,400. That's a lot. That's about $13,000 a month. But we actually net an average of $264 per month, which left us with about $3,000 left over for the year. Okay. That's great. Now, our only debt that we have is our mortgage. We pay $3,400 per month. For the year, we spent around $41,000, and it was 23% of our annual budget. That's pretty good. Yeah, right? I think so, too. That's better than I thought it was going to be. So what's remaining on our mortgage is $499,000. We finally got it under 500K. Thank you. I've been waiting for this for a long time. And we currently have a 7% interest rate. Not very long. Slow down. We know what you're going to say. It's going down. We're working on it. It's going down, and we're trying to refinance. All right. Let's take a look at our fixed expenses. This includes our utilities and groceries, water. We spent $1,100 for the year. Cell phone was $420. Groceries and toiletries and household and liquor and all that, $13,293. That averages out to $1,100 per month, and we are a family of four with two young kids. That equated to 7% of our annual budget. Wow. That's higher than I thought it would be. I don't know. Where does that sit with everybody else? Does that seem like a good number? I'm curious. Electricity, we spent $1,900. Natural gas, $1,300. And HOA dues was $880 for the year. So a lot of money spent in utilities, actually. Yeah. I mean, it gets cold. Like the wind chill this past weekend was negative 20. We'll have heat indexes close to 120 in the summertime. So we run our AC and our heat a lot. Keep this in mind when you upgrade to a larger home. Between water for $1,100, electricity, $1,900, and natural gas, $1,300. That equals about $4,500 for the year in just utilities. Going on down to gas, gas for two vehicles was $1,800. In various car maintenance fees, such as oil changes, repairs, that was $1,300. No, so for car maintenance for a year, that's actually pretty good. Yeah. And the gas is a lot higher than what it was in California. Because in California, you didn't drive very much. So here, everything's a lot further apart. So you got to drive more. Yeah. So not everything in the Midwest is cheaper. Like gas is cheaper, but you're spending more. You're running. Yeah, you're running through it more. Jewelers insurance for my wedding ring, $120. Car insurance was $1,300 for two vehicles. So that averages out to $114 per month. If you're like, what? What? Please check out my car insurance video on how you can adjust your different coverages to get a lower premium. Homeowner's insurance was $2,200 for the year. That was a huge jump from year one of home ownership. Now for our biggest expenses, aside from mortgage, we pay a at-home nanny. She was paid $22,000 for... That was a partial year. She started in June. Preschool, we paid over $14,000, which will be ending in August. We are very excited to at least have part of our budget back. It's been sad that we'll have a kindergarten. Yes. These by far, aside from the mortgage, is our biggest expense. And let us know in the comments below, what's your biggest expense from last year? Between the, if you add the nanny and the preschool together, it's $3,000. That's almost our mortgage payment right there. Yeah. That's pretty crazy. Yep. So if you're looking at the $22,000 plus the almost $15,000, you're looking at nearly $37,000 in childcare alone. We get a lot of comments about that. So let us know. Are we crazy? Childcare is expensive. That's about all I have to say about that. Restaurants, we spent $4,200 in the year, which equals about $350 per month. That's lower than I thought it would be. And it's only accounted for 2% of our budget. Okay. Yeah. So I thought we did really well on that. Shopping, we spent $5,300 in the year, which accounted for 3% of our annual budget. Let's talk about clothing. I spent almost $2,000 on clothing. That seems insane. Even though it was 1% of our annual budget. But do those include the expensive wedding dresses that you had to buy? Yes, it does. Okay. So that's like half of it, at least. Okay. Thank you. I was like, $2,000 on clothes? What's hanging in my closet? I feel like I don't own a lot of clothes. That's the silly thing about it. Kyle only spent $530 on clothes. And a big chunk of that was new pants for the wedding and new shirt, new tie. Yeah. That was like 300 bucks. That I didn't even care about. She was the one who's like, you got to go get new pants. And I was like, what's wrong with these 10-year-old pants that I have? So yeah. And the rest of that is from Costco. He's a Costco king. I'm telling you. Okay. For Quinn and Lucy, for our girls, this was not planned, but we spent nearly the dollar for dollar, same amount on each of them, $1,700 for both of them in the year. That included things like clothes, birthday party supplies, activities. For Lucy, it was really just like baby feeding supplies, bottles, that sort of thing. Haircuts, we spent $635 on haircuts for the year. I think a lot of that had to do when you were purchasing the subscription. When I had hair still. When you had hair. But aren't we loving this look? No, we're not doing that in this video. Let's get right back into it. Gifts. We spent a good amount on gifts, $4,300 in the year, which was about $358 per month on gifts. And this also includes our Christmas budget. Any Christmas decor items or gift wrap, anything like that, Christmas cards, goes into gifts and Christmas. It seems about right for us. It'll seem high for some families and might seem low for others. I know some people who are like, oh, we spend $5,000 a year on our kids each. And I'm like, but how? That number varies widely, family to family. Yes, it does. Health was just about $400. Fun money for us was. Wait, wait, wait, wait. We had a kid last year. I don't believe that number for a second. Yeah. We have a health savings account where we spend money from that. Yeah. Okay. So that's not included in that number. Fun money was $3,500. And this really is anything from concert tickets to golf experiences to bar hopping. I don't know how much bar hopping we did last year. We averaged about $292 in fun money. Cleaning. We hired professional cleaners to clean our house. That was about $3,500 in the year or $300 per month. Is it worth it? Yes and no. I mean, I feel like. No, you can't say that. It's a yes or no question. Yes. Yes, it is. For $3,500. Yeah. When it adds up like that, you're kind of like, oh, maybe I need to be more on top of it. But in our busy lives right now, it's just nice to have that once a month clean. Is there more you want to say on that? It's just, well, we're getting new cleaners. So I'm hoping that for the same cost, the new cleaners will do a better job. I felt like our return on cleaning value, whatever you want to call that for $300 just wasn't there. I was like, you guys just vacuum and wipe stuff down. Like I can do that too. I'm hoping that I come back and I go, wow, this is clean. Rather than, wow, this just looks vacuumed. So we'll see how that turns out. For subscriptions, we spent $1,900 in the year, about $162 per month. That includes various things like Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Prime. I have a hair coloring kit that I have a subscription for. So little things like that, that add up. $352 in miscellaneous expenses. I also included your work expenses because we included it as income for all of your reimbursements. We spent close to $6,000 on work expenses from our personal credit card. We got reimbursed for it, but that's also reflected up here in the income. Last year was a light travel year. Here's where things get tricky with our future category. Every good budget has savings built in. And this is what we did. We did not contribute anything to our emergency fund because we have about $40,000 saved up, which for us is equal to about six months of emergency expenses. Vacation fund, I actually split out into spent and saved. So we spent $3,400 from our vacation fund, even though we only saved $1,200. So we actually carried money over from the previous year. There was a balance already in our vacation fund. And so that's why you're like, how did you spend more than you saved? Because we already had money rolled over in that high yield savings account. Having a kid too, we weren't really looking at vacations very well last year. So maybe that'll change this year. We hope. The car fund, we saved about $5,600 for our next vehicle, even though we bought a vehicle in October of 2024. So just over a year ago, we're already anticipating the next replacement car. So that's why we're saving for that. We also set aside $1,200 in the year for Quinn's college fund and $800 in the year for Lucy's college fund. I had to set up Lucy's as like a brand new account after she was born. So that's why hers is a little less. But moving forward, they each get $100 contributed into their 529 plan. Here's where things got really confusing for me because we have a home updates high yield savings account where we use for big major projects around the house, such as building the retaining wall. You guys have heard us talk about the basement renovation we want to do. We're in the market for a new furnace. So I had earlier in the year, just lumped all of the savings and the spending into one cell. And that was a mistake. So it was a little unclear about total saved versus total spent. So for example, I know for sure, we spent $17,000 at the end of the day on that retaining wall. We saved close to $12,000 for home date updates. And if you're like, well, you spent more than you saved. Again, we had money kind of rolled over from the previous year. But I know we spent more than that just based off of what that retaining wall cost was because we had other things happen throughout 2025. Let's look at the pie chart and the percentages, because this is a really quick and easy way to see how your money's been spent. So obviously the blue was our mortgage, the debt, and then this gray is nanny and preschool. So these three slices are ready. You can tell biggest line items and then home updates. That's like our top four. But it wasn't like these home updates weren't like, hey, this would be nice. It was more like, hey, we kind of need to do this. So that's like the bad taste in my mouth I have from that. Hopefully, if we continue to do upgrades to the house, it'll be like, oh, look at this improvement we made rather than, oh, look at this maintenance project we did. Exactly. My takeaway here in the most notable expenses was the retaining wall and child care outside of the mortgage. So those were two big, big items for us for 2025. Now we're going to take a look at some of the deductions that we're taking out of our paycheck, Kyle's paycheck, before we got the money. So let's take a look at job deductions and what you actually paid for for our family. Because since I'm the W-2 employer, we get health insurance through my employer, so I have all the stuff, the fun, as Justine will call it. So per month, you were setting aside $575 towards our health savings account, which is about $6,900 for the year. I feel like we could also kind of slightly increase that since the max is something like $7,300 for a family. It went up. My company contributes like $1,500 for our HSA, so that way we don't have to contribute so much. So that's not included in this number. That's right. Disability insurance was $47 per month. Dental insurance was $40 per month or $486 for the year. Vision was $22 per month or $268 for the year. Health insurance was $581 per month or about $7,000 for the year, which honestly, I feel like we're doing great because that covers four people. Yeah, and for some of the health insurance nightmare rates that I've been seeing, I'm very thankful for that number. I wish it was lower. I mean, don't we all? Retirement, you contribute nearly $2,000 per month, which is maxing out the retirement contributions for the year at 23.5. We pay for basic term life insurance. Does this include both you and me? You, me, and the girls. Okay, so $21 per month for term life. So $253 per year. Please check with your employer's benefits if they offer basic term life insurance. It is a no-brainer. Monthly contribution is $3,200. That is insane. It's a lot of money. That is insane, insane. Wow, I never added it up then. Might need another beer after this. This is wild. Employer contributions, we didn't actually, this was a little difficult for us to find. Yeah, it's all hidden on different pages on my work websites and stuff. And I'm like, I don't know how much the company actually pays, yada, yada, yada. But they do a company match. The longer you're with the company, the more the match increases. So I think I'm at like 6% is what I'm at, which is pretty good. I love that. So in addition, Kyle's employer is contributing $1,300 per month towards his retirement. As of last year, they put in close to $16,000 into your 401k, which is amazing. Thank you. I also updated some of our investment total balances as of December 31st. These were all of the numbers from our various investing accounts. We don't include everything, everything for privacy purposes, but we try to share literally 99% of our investments so that you can see exactly how things shake up. So we've got different IRAs, a brokerage, a couple of brokerages, and they continue to grow month over month. If you want to capture your expenses and income in a yearly review, you can actually get this template along with a monthly budget template for free by heading to debtfreemillennials.com slash toolkit or using the link in the description box below. Have you caught our last episode of what a real regular monthly budget looks like for us? Then you'll definitely want to check out this video next.