How Well Did we Live up to Our March Budget?

As I noted last week, I’m working on creating a very concrete, numbers based post on Tuesdays and a more introspective post on Thursdays. So today’s post is all about March spending compared to our estimated budget. 

One announcement, though: I created an email list. Sign up here to receive notification of each new post: 

Onto March 2018 spending!

Our estimated spending amounts are on the left, after the descriptive label (i.e. saving, housing, etc.). Our actual spending is on the right under “Actual.”

Estimates are in this blueish color; actual numbers if equal to the estimate are in green, if we went over they are are red,  and if we spent under they are black.

Saving: 200; Actual: 200

Housing: 900; Actual: 900

Utilities: 338.64; Actual: 338.64*

Food: 665; Actual: 685.82 (went over by 20.82) 

Transportation: 80;  Actual: 125.31 (went over by 45.31)

Medical/Health: 696.31; Actual: 669.73 (under by 26.58)

Car Insurance: 84; Actual: 84

Personal: 35; Actual: 35.34 

Recreation: 18.98; Actual: 18.98*

Misc: 220, Actual: 173.48 (under by 46.52)

*Some of the estimated and actual numbers are exactly the same to the cent because at times I do the budget after paying some bills. (I’m not that great an estimator.)

Estimated: Income $3264 – Estimated spending $3172.93  = amount left over $91.07 

Actual: Income $3264 – spending $3244.80  = we finished under by $19.20!

What you don’t see on this page so far is that we spent $1245.31 of our emergency fund. We had 2 larger medical bills, and I knew we hadn’t budgeted for them, so I paid them out of our emergency fund.

In short, it was a pretty good budgeting month. I’m a little surprised we spent so much on food; I’m the main grocery shopper so it would have been me. I’m not sure how our gas spending got so high. Mr. POAI went on a few short road trips, but besides that I think our driving was normal.

 

I’m glad that ultimately, we came in just under budget. Woot!

~Jaye