We Spent Over $5K on ONE Item!

We weren't expecting to drop a five grand on the house in one month. Can you guess what it is? No. Hey, Beers and Budgeting. We're back. Cheers with a beer. My name is Justine. This is my husband Kyle. Every month we share our real income and expenses from a real millennial family and just trying to do life. And we thought why not inspire you to create some financial confidence by showing our numbers. So we're going to start off right with our income and expense summary. And I thought we would share the review table this time because it has a very nifty pie chart that shows exactly how our income and expenses breaks up. So here's how much we brought in. $13,128. Yep, and then our expenses. $12,347. Leaving us with the total balance of positive $781. Yay, sparkles and rainbows. I feel like it's been a while since we've had like a good Delta in there or like in the positive. Yes, but wait, there's more. Yes. Medical bills. Medical bills and also we bought something major for the house. So we did some major spending on the house that wasn't really expected, but it's something that everybody needs. Was it the furnace? It was the furnace. The furnace is original with the house. It's 20 years old, probably should lean into getting a new one. We had planned on that when we moved in. We just didn't know when it was going to happen. So this is kind of a surprise, but an opportunity came up where we could get a very affordable furnace through some contacts, basically got it at cost. So that felt really good to get a nice furnace for a good deal. Yeah, and my dad helps supervise all of that because he worked in the HVAC industry for decades and knows exactly what to do. And he also told us that our furnace was just not running efficient. I know more than you. So with this new gear and with my dad's help, we will have it replaced in the spring, which is why we spent $5,300 on a new furnace. Yes, if you haven't checked out how much we've actually spent in one year on home ownership costs, like outside from actually buying the house, then you definitely want to check out that video next. I'm curious, when was the last time you bought a furnace and how much did it cost? That's a great question. Yeah, I am curious about that because I don't, our father, my father-in-law, her dad did all this stuff for us and said, hey, this is a fantastic deal. You should not pass this up. So I'm curious, what did you spend? How much was it? How big is it? All the things that you would need to know. I'm curious. Speaking of which, are you feeling like your finances just aren't clicking yet in 2026? Then you'll definitely want to check out my live training on how you can achieve financial confidence and crush your debt while still keeping your little luxuries in 90 days. I'm hosting a free live training coming up soon at the end of this month. Click the link below to register for free and come hang out. Let's get into our regular fixed expenses and what's going on. Some other big news, positive news is we are refinancing our house. Yep. So Kyle and I saw that interest rates were down from our lender and we called them up and we ran the math and realized that we could break even on the deal in six months. Yeah, I think less than that, like four months, four and a half or something like that. Just something wildly fast. Our current interest rate is 7% and we are refinancing to 5.75% which is saving us over $400 per month in our mortgage payment. That's going to be a huge cost savings to us that is most likely going to go towards things like home upgrades. It's just really nice to know that we have extra wiggle room to put that cash elsewhere. Moving down to the fixed items. It was a shorter month. So for all y'all, this should have been relatively easier on your wallet, mainly with things like groceries. We had $1,000 planned grocery budget and we spent $751. That's great. I felt like we had a lot more casseroles and crock-pot meals this past month. We sure did. Now some things we did. We went over on our gas budget for our cars by 23 bucks, but that wasn't a huge expense. You only spent $80 from our home improvement and repairs sinking fund. So solid. I don't know what that was on, but sounds good. In our fund category. We also did really well here. We spent $330 on restaurants. The fun money spending was a little overboard and mainly it was weird. It was like we went to these coffee shops. Like I went with my sister to a coffee shop and then you and I got coffees while we were out at the library and then there were just like some odds and ends. We went to a cocktail lounge for my sister's birthday. And so I put that the concert. I put that towards the fun money. We actually had fun in February. Who knew? Did we? We did. Okay, I remember what the home improvement was. Quinn built a shelf in her in her closet. That's right. Yeah, you guys did a little daddy dot home improvement project for her. She did it all by herself. I let the four-year-old use the saw and the drill by herself. He's joking. Yes, I am. Okay, am I? I don't know. Miscellaneous. We had $285 in miscellaneous expenses that actually went towards passport costs. So everybody has a passport. And then just kind of our standard savings that the home upgrades obviously got subtracted out. Actually this 13-5 number is before the 5200 gets subtracted out. So we're actually closer to what that's 8,000. Yeah. So 8,000 is left in the home upgrades, which we definitely need to pay for landscaping because we finished part of the water mitigation that we had taught. We've been talking about you guys probably sick of that. Yeah, I know. We've been talking about it since last July. Yeah, and it's complete. Yeah, so that's another good good thing for February. Nobody seems to rain really hard to test it. Yeah, all of our sinking funds for a vacation in a new car and the girls individual 529 plans have been up to date along with the real number of our emergency fund, which is sitting at over 41 K. That's in a high-yield savings account. Yeah, all of our sinking funds are in a high-yield savings account. The emergency fund is. Yes. Okay. Yep. Yeah, obviously a 529 plans are in a 529 plant, but okay. One thing that we need to talk about medical expenses. So we thought last year when I had a baby that we were done with paying high medical expenses and we were going to hit that was like the one and done going to hit our deductible and are out of pocket and that was it. We are on the fast track to doing that again this year kids have lots of doctors appointments just like routine thing. It's not like someone fell out of tree and broke an arm or something like that. You know, that's just random routine things. So I wanted to show you. I logged into our health insurance plan and saw that we had already spent $2,500 and put that towards our deductible out of a $3,400 limit our out-of-pocket max is $6,800 for our family plan. And I think we're going to eat that up between routine care for Kyle and I and for the girls. We have well child checkups and I had a dermatology visit and just regular like going to the doctor like nothing in in our medical routine and what we're doing our appointments for is anything that I would say like, oh scary. Yeah, like it's all routine stuff, but it's just costing so much money. Yeah, America. The good news is we have a health savings account that pays for our medical expenses. So anytime we are putting money towards our health plan, it's coming out of the HSA. By the way, if you don't know what a health savings account is then I have a whole video explaining it. There's also another strategy that I've seen people do where they don't spend anything out of their HSA at all. And all they do is let it grow because you can take your HSA and invest it like you would have any investment you can put it in index funds, whatever and let it grow and you have access to those funds for the rest of your life. So people who don't take anything out of that account when they're young use it as a safety net for when they're older. I thought that was kind of interesting. Yeah, I wish we could do that right now. But in all reality, we need the money right now. Yeah. Yeah, there's no way we could do that. All right. So the max family contribution for a health savings account this year is $8,750. Your employer, I finally figured it out, contributes $1,500. Yeah. So we need to figure out how your paycheck needs to increase that contribution per month. It's only slightly because I think you need to... Oh, it's per week. Yeah, per week. I think you need to add like another $20 and then you'll have it maxed out. It's already maxed out. Oh, perfect. Yeah. To the new contribution limit. Yep. Sweet. I did that the first week of January. Wow. I know, for once I'm on top of something. Nice job there. I know. My wife who does personal finance would be really proud of me. You should meet her. She's pretty cool. Yeah. Look at us. Those were the big items for February. We paid the Subaru car insurance premium of $303. That's for six months of coverage. I think next month we'll probably have to do that for the Kia. What do we got going on for March that financially we need to be aware of? Kid's birthday, our anniversary. Yes, our wedding anniversary. And if I can type our daughter's birthday. Birthday. Anything else? Hopefully nothing. Kyle and I have really kind of been on this like no spend train and pattern and I kind of want to keep it that way while we just kind of level out some of our home expenses. I don't even know when last time was we bought something off Amazon. Yeah, it's been a while. It's been a little while since we just bought anything. I'm enjoying it. And also like it's a little tough. Yeah, it's been tough. I think the main issue is just feeling financially anxious with all of the money that's been pouring into the house. And so we really just wanted to take a step back to say, okay, like let's really control the spending and be intentional about it. And so I think that's why we haven't just gone on Amazon and scrolling like, oh, yeah, let's get this. Let's get this and we've really just kind of taken a step back like asking ourselves, do we really need this restaurant spending? Can we fix something at home? So that's been helpful. If you haven't caught our year-end review where we go over the total income and expenses that we made last year, you definitely want to check that out. And if you don't have this template, this is your signal to go in, purchase once, use for life, and start tracking your numbers so that you can build that financial confidence. Cheers.