February Spending Review

Blogging $3.07
Business expenses (deductable) $3.89
Car $139.79
Charity $310
Clothing $201.64
Food—dining out $243.89
Food—groceries $370.33
Household items $225.03
House $1392.29
Hygiene/Medical $22.35
Sewing/Quilting $3
Student loans $403.83
Transportation $100
Utilities $349.84
Vacation $1169.18
Yoga $65

Total Spending: $5061.92

Things of note: 
See those clothing expenditures? Those are all Peanut. Not me at all! He goes clothes shopping about every other year, and he was seriously due to update his uniform wardrobe. We picked up over a week's worth of t-shirts, four hoodies, and three pairs of jeans, plus a sweater that we'll be returning because, let's be honest, he'll never wear it. He still needs a new pair of shoes but he probably won't buy them until his current shoes start letting water in.

Sometimes I'm seriously jealous of his ability to wear the exact same thing, day in and day out, in different colors, and that he can wear t-shirts and jeans and hoodies to work every day. Then again, I like dressing up sometimes!

Our household spending was higher than normal due to the restaurant supply stores and estate sales. It'll be high in March, too, because we're doing some painting and furnishing the guest room, but hopefully after that it'll go back down.

It seems like this is a pretty representative month for utilities, our first real idea of what that's going to look like. The breakdown is as follows:

• Peanut cell phone $45
• My cell phone $66
• Home internet $22 (this is a little low; I think it'll usually be around $36)
• City water/sewer/trash $58.25
• Electric $57.25
• Gas $100.26

Compare this to the average $229 in 2011 when we lived in apartments and you can see that our utility bills have jumped by about $120. (In New York, we had to pay gas/electric personally but heat/hot water/garbage were included in our rent. In Minneapolis, all utilities were included in our monthly statement.) It's possible we could nudge this down a little more but I'm pretty satisfied. I've already lowered our trash bill by $3 per month by requesting a 22-gallon bin instead of a 94-gallon bin, plus we get a $7 credit per month for recycling. We programmed our thermostat to drop during the day when we're not home and at night when we're sleeping. Most of our lightbulbs are CFLs and we'll replace all of them with CFLs as they burn out. Certainly there are additional things we can do to bridge the gap, but I was expecting a difference between apartment and house of a few hundred dollars, so ~$120 is just fine by me.