Last week I shared what our grocery budget was in 2020. Now in this post I’m going to go over the other budget items that we had and maybe this will help you look at your expenses to see if there’s anything in 2021 that you can adjust.

• 2020 was our full year having a mortgage.
  • Less than 25% of our take home pay. This has always been important to us.
  • Don’t have too much house.
  • 20-25% of your take home pay goes to mortgage/rent

• Electric, gas, water, internet, cell phone are some of those recurring bills.
  • No cable – learning to live without watching sports
  • Interestingly, we have HBO Max, Hulu, Disney+ covered by our cell phone plan and internet
  • YouTube!!!

• Fuel we spent $845, average of $70/mo. Amazing how the pandemic changed this.
  • in 2019 our fuel line item was a total of $1980, average $165/mo.

• Various kinds of insurance we have
• The other categories included:
  • Dining Out
  • Charitable Giving
  • Buffer:
    • any kind of spending: clothes, something for the house, car, something I want, she wants.

• Lessons learned
  • 4th year of budgeting done – still going strong
  • Takes time, but budgeting is worth doing
  • Not having so many expenses helps makes things easy
  • Simplicity is key