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The budget breakdown of a 39-year-old Marketing professional on $14K a month in Austin, TXFeatured

The Budget Breakdown aims to broaden the conversation on money and offer insights into various approaches to spending, saving, and investing.

✨ Want to share your monthly budget breakdown with us? Please fill out this form here and we will get back to you (can be posted anonymously like this one too 😉)

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💰 Income (shared with partner)

Monthly Gross Income: $14,525

Monthly Net Income: $9,399.50

Other Income Sources: $6,667 (Spouse), $500 (AirBnB)

Dependants: 1 child

🏡 Monthly Fixed Expenses (shared with partner)

Mortgage: $5,900

Utilities (Electricity, Water, Gas): $500

Internet: $100 (paid by employer)

Transportation: $650 [car payment ($500), Gas, and Uber rides]

Home Insurance: $250

Health and Life Insurance: covered at no cost from work

Debt: $32,285.53 (Car loan, student loans, credit card)

Subscriptions: $210 (streaming/cable, Patreon, news memberships)

Other: $250 for house cleaning

🛒 Monthly Variable Expenses (shared with partner)

Groceries: $1000

Eating Out (Restaurants, Bars): $625 (we have 1250 set aside for food delivery, going out, and misc)

Entertainment (Movies, Events, Hobbies): $625 (we have 1250 set aside for food delivery, going out, and misc)

Personal Care: $300

Travel:

We budget for this per month - so when we know we have a trip, we don’t spend as much in other places (i.e. the $1,250 fund above) so we can spend that on the trip. For tickets, hotels, etc. we use a lot of points or we dip into savings to pay for those when we need to, making sure to replenish the savings over the next month or two.

💸 Monthly Savings and Investments (shared with partner)

Emergency Fund Contributions: $1000 to accessible savings

Retirement Savings (401(k)/Pension, IRA/Roth IRA):

$1452.5 from my monthly paychecks

$500 from my spouse

Investments (Stocks, Bonds, Mutual Funds, Real Estate): $2500 to a managed portfolio fund

🎁 Monthly miscellaneous (shared with partner)

Gifts and Donations: We budget for this per month - if we know we have a holiday or birthday coming up, we pull from other buckets to cover that

Childcare/Education: $400 per month

Pet Care: $225 per month

Two gym memberships: $430

Therapy: $150

⚖️ Final balance (shared with partner)

Total income: $14,877

Total expenses: $14,250

Final balance: $627

💭 Money Reflections

1. How much does tracking your personal finances influence your spending, saving, and investing habits?

Not as much as it should! We can be good at roughly knowing what we should be doing, but not so good at balancing our checkbook or sticking to the budget. It is an ongoing struggle to get us to focus and commit.

2. Is there anything you wish you would spend less money on?

I wish everything cost less money, especially transportation. We had to buy a car at the worst possible time and I HATE how much we spend per month on a car we don’t even want. I also think we spend too much money on impulsive little things (too lazy to cook, let’s order in; this shirt is cool!)

3. What do you consider important to spend money on?

Experiences, especially things that enrich my child’s life (we paid way too much for a summer camp to try to give him the best experience).

4. Do you have any short-term or long-term financial goals?

We just bought a house! Our short-term goal is not to go into financial ruin, hahaha. This will be a major adjustment to our budget and really tighten things up for us. We will be required to rethink our budget and really pay more attention to it. Long-term goals: I’d like to have enough financial security that I can be flexible in my work; work because I want to, not because I have to. I would like to be able to retire early enough to enjoy life.

5. What is your approach to saving/investing? Are there any specific strategies you follow?

We max out our 401K matching at both of our jobs. We try to have 3 months of savings liquid in a standard savings account. And then we try to contribute as much as we can to an investment portfolio - generally $2000+ each month. We are working towards getting to a self-feeding portfolio as soon as possible so our money can be making money, as is the dream :)

6. What was your relationship with money like growing up? Did you talk about it with your parents/caregivers?

I hate money. Hahaha. Hate it. Nothing stresses me out more. Money was always a point of contention between my divorced parents and both had very different approaches/relationships with money themselves. So I grew up needing to accommodate both and not really developing my own. I am very comfortable talking about money, but I ultimately find it kind of confusing and overwhelming. I am good at making a budget, but not always sticking to it. It has gotten easier as I’ve gotten older and gotten more comfortable asking questions and learning without feeling shame.

7. Did you receive any formal or informal financial education growing up? If yes, where did you learn to manage your personal finances?

No formal training. My mom was very bad with money. My dad is much better. I learned a lot from watching them both, honestly. I’ve learned the most from talking with friends - it is really powerful to be candid about money with people you trust! Most recently, we’ve started working with a financial advisor and that has been crucial to helping us understand how best to manage our money.

💡 Ask the community

I'd love tricks on EASY budget check-ins and accountability hacks. The only system I’ve made work for me required an hour or so a week of checking in on all my accounts to see where my money was going and balance our budget as I went along. It got overwhelming. What are the simple basics I have to do each month to make sure I am on track?

Madalyn207·Jul 19

Truly eye-opening! Your gross salary, 401k contributions, and variable expenses look exactly like mine. But your mortgage is 3x and you're still saving and investing so much more each month. This is really making me want to go look at my spending (clothes, travel, subscriptions) and cut back. Awesome breakdown. Thank you for sharing!

Danna89·Jul 19

I'm am her. :) And I can tell you, we are STRETCHING with that mortgage. It was an intentional choice to seize an opportunity we were really more than two years away from being comfortable with. We have to really focus our casual spending in order to keep our savings in check. It's hard!

elisegatsby·Jul 19

Thanks for sharing! Can you tell me more about this "self-feeding portfolio"? Does this simply mean large enough to generate interest/dividends that feed back into the portfolio? I'm a huge budgeter and saver but rather cautious when it comes to investing.

Danna89·Jul 20

Hello! Yes, exactly. We work with a financial advisor who manages a portfolio of investments for us. (I personally know so very little about how stocks and bonds actually work, but they are wonderful humans who we trust, so that has been a tremendous help.) They have told us that $50k invested is the first "magic number" where things start extrapolating at a faster rate. At a certain point (depending on your investments, your financial needs, etc.) you can pull a salary from the profit of the portfolio alone.

EmilyDiNuzzo·Jul 19

Really appreciate you sharing your numbers with us! Something I do/a way I check-in with myself before making a purchase is determining how many hours of work I need to do to afford something. So if you're making about 14K monthly, that's about $80/hr rate. If a cool shirt as you say costs something like $100, ask if you would work a little over an hour for it. I also highly recommend Ramit Seth and his style of budgeting for a rich life!

Danna89·Jul 20

I love this! Thank you for sharing!

teresaman·Jul 19

Came to say how much I love therapy as a fixed line item and not a variable expense! ❤️

jwolcott·Jul 19

Thanks for sharing! My budget system is to use YNAB (You Need A Budget) and it can be hugely helpful in controlling spending with relatively little effort. Although admittedly sometimes I just spend time moving money around to accommodate what we actually spent instead of what we planned to spend.One piece of advice for you - make a budget category in your savings account for home maintenance. You just bought a house, there will be expenses every single year that you can’t predict. The rule of thumb is to set aside 1% of the house’s value every year for maintenance and repairs. I suspect we have spent rather more than that in almost 11 years of homeownership - like a year and a half ago when we had to have a tunnel dug under the slab in order to replace all of our drain lines. Insurance covered about half, we paid like $30k out of pocket. Not to mention the roof replacement… The point is, it’s easier to handle big unexpected expenses if you save extra up front.

Danna89·Jul 20

This is wonderful advice, thank you for sharing! The issue I've always had with YNAB or similar apps is the set up - I can never seem to get it working correctly (labeling transitions right, etc.) in the first place. It ends up being more of a chore than anything else. Yes to a home maintenance budget! We have previously pulled from savings, or even our investments, for unexpected line items like that. But it is smart to think about the increased likelihood of that and needing to sock more away in advance.

brookevlasich·Jul 20

I use Good Budget to track my expenses. You can access it online and make updates via their app. I find it very useful for staying on track.

pax·Jul 21

Rocket Money has been the only budgeting tool I've been able to keep up with. It's automatic once you link everything securely through Plaid and it pulls all of your accounts to give a great holistic view of spending (checking, savings, credit cards, investments, retirement accounts, student loans, etc.)It's also easy to make bulk changes and create rules (I had the same issue you mentioned with YNAB about never getting the labels quite right). With this one, it auto applies them for you based on what it most likely is. If it's wrong, you can create a "rule" from within the most recent transaction to say "if from this company or this store etc., apply to this category" and you can bulk apply that retroactively as well. It gives a weekly breakdown of what you spent the most on each week, shows your net worth, etc.

Pauline146·Jul 22

Thanks for sharing your budget with us, and congrats on buying your home (even though it was a financial stretch)! Other than the car payments, you didn't really mention how you are addressing your debt, especially the credit card debt. I would consider trying to pay that down as fast as possible as the interest rates can be really high, even if it means shrinking your Eating Out/Entertainment budget. It's great and I fully support giving your kiddo great experiences. I don't know how old your child is, but they will probably remember and value the travel and such experiences more as they are older, so if you limit those now to clear your debt and then invest more in it later, they will remember and appreciate those experiences more then. Also think it's great that you're working with a financial planner and getting set up for the long-term!