Budget Porn: Our 2015 Spending

In the halcyon days of 2012, when this blog was bright eyed, and idealistic, we wrote net worth and budget posts every month. They were my favorite, as the posts basically wrote themselves. I just cut and pasted an image out of my budget spreadsheet, talked about the categories we did well in and where we did poorly, and poof, all of a sudden I had eight hundred words on truly personal finance: my personal finances. Eventually, when people we knew in real life started reading the blog, we took all those posts down, along with any others that crossed the line into the gauche. It felt weird that some friends and family knew our exact net worth or how much we spent on groceries and medical care.

Still, they were some of our most popular posts. It didn't hurt that I could play off of our natural inclination towards voyeurism, and could craft some click bait by titling the posts as "Budget Porn". It's tempting to pull back the curtains and see how our neighbors live, especially in their financial lives. How often do we get to see someone else's paycheck, their checking account, maybe even their investment portfolio?

Well, today you get a little piece of that. While I don't like publishing a post like this once a month, and I certainly don't like the way it made me feel to have our income and net worth out there for anyone to see, I suppose seeing our expenses once a year is fine.

For a little more context, here's how these numbers compare to 2014.

Travel: Once again, travel was our largest single expense...which is just how we like it. If you had to pick just one thing, and all that. Most of this expense line was for our two trips to Europe, which travel hacking only covered partially: flights and some hotels, but not AirBNBs, trains, food, or beer. Some of it is for smaller trips out to California to see family, too, and big chunks of the 2015 expenses are actually for travel in 2016. (For example, did I mention that I'm typing this on my phone in our first night in Istanbul? Paid for back in 2015.) Still, at nearly seven grand, we spent about twenty cents out of every dollar on travel. That doesn't seem sustainable long term.

Date Night and Restaurants, since they're kind of the same thing: We eat out a lot, at least compared to some frugal folks. Chipotle, despite the lingering threat of food poisoning, is still by far our most popular takeout. (Pro tip: get a burrito bowl, and ask for two tortillas on the side. You get more of everything due to the natural human desire to fill plates or bowls, enough to split with two people, and making tiny, bite sized tacos with a fork and ripped off pieces of tortilla is really fun, too. Oh, and if you ask for a bunch of lettuce, you get more veggies while also covering up the guacamole, and sometimes they forget to charge you the extra couple bucks. You now know all our Chipotle tricks.)

We also like going out to restaurants, so combined with our love for takeout, these make up a sizable chunk of our annual budget: over $4,800, or about 14% of all the money we spent in 2015. Seems like a lot.

Still, this is quality time spent with Mrs. Done by Forty, and time saved from cooking and cleaning up. While we could definitely save some coin in this area, I might look other places first.

Groceries: Despite spending more on dinners out, our grocery budget has gone up by a grand this year over last. I suspect the reason is just lifestyle creep: we're no longer driven by the desire to be incrementally more frugal, so we have gone in the other direction, and are spending more in a lot of areas. But on a more granular level, we are doing two things: we are buying better groceries rather than just focusing on sale items, and we are hanging out with friends more and, thus, buying a lot more six packs and bottles of wine. A small price to pay for eating better food and playing board games a few times a week, right?


Well, it is 3 am here in Turkey and we are in full on jet lag mode. But I am glad to write again, even on a little phone, and even about something as worrisome as sharing your expenses with the world. I never know how to feel about our spending. Are we still too frugal? Too focused on financial goals alone? Or, given that we don't have a mortgage, are we just like any other family on the block, and probably spending too much?

I am torn between justifying all our dollars spent, thinking that we are "doing it right", and, on the other hand, feeling some shame about spending so much on luxuries. Who needs that many burrito bowls and pizzas after all?

But these are questions for future Brian. Present Brian needs to get some sleep and then deal with the odd AirBNB message he got from his host, explaining that he put us in the wrong room, and would we mind moving to a smaller place without a balcony? Something to deal with in the morning. For now, sleep.


*Photo is from Mike Mozart at Flickr Creative Commons.