September 2023: Budget Adjustments in Preparation for Student Loan Resumption
Main goals
The main goal for September was to start saving up for the Fresh Start loan payments in our budget and really work on lowering Dining Out spend.
Major developments
It was difficult to estimate how much to really include in the budget for the student loans, since we had applied for Income Driven Repayment and had no idea about which plan would work best for us. We used the Student Aid website's Loan Estimator with last year's tax return, and got very different estimates so I opted to take the largest monthly payment as a worst case scenario and used that amount ($540), which meant we had to drastically adjust some of our categories so as not to touch the savings buckets.
Dining out has been one of those categories which we always try to lower, but we both enjoy going out occasionally and treat it as a way to hang out with other foodies or explore different cuisine. While I don't think we will ever completely bring this category to zero, we were able to cut our dining out category in half this month by being more mindful of and intentional about our dining out urges. If it was just us being lazy, we tried to eat more leftovers, but if we were celebrating a special occasion, we allowed ourselves to go out.
The numbers
| Category | Amount | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Net worth | -$9k | Pretty sizeable +$4k increase from last month! |
| Rent and utilities | $1.6k | |
| Groceries | $0.4k | Seems like our grocery bill is holding steady in this range. Mostly food from Aldi and local mart in a pinch. |
| Medical and health-related | $0.2k | Been debating whether to add fitness-related activities in this category as theoretically, it would be spend that would avoid further medical fees. Right now, I just decided to do needed fitness-related fees like bike maintenance and tuneup costs here, while wants such as sports classes will fall under Entertainment. |
| Transportation | $0.2k | Ubers/Lyfts for those far places |
| International / visa-related | $0 | |
| Home maintenance and supplies | $0 | |
| Pets | $0.5k | Cats had their annual visit this month and had some vaccine shots |
| Dining out | $0.4k | This is a good step in the right direction! Hopefully we can keep the spending for this in the same ballpark moving forward. |
| Entertainment | $0 | |
| Gifts | $0 | |
| Miscellaneous | $0.4k | This is way too big each month, so I will start trying to break this out in smaller categories next month. |
| Total | $3.7k | Our second lowest spending month in 12 months! |
