And We're Back!! | February 2025 Beers & Budgeting

I feel a little nervous doing this. Back in front of the camera. Back in front of the camera. It's been a while. We realized at the time that this video drops, it's basically summer. We're actually going over February's budget, so stick around. Hey guys, welcome back. Like seriously, welcome back to me. Welcome back to you. We're coming back to the DFM channel. I'm your host, Justine. This is my husband, Kyle. And this is your favorite series, Beers and Budgeting, where we go over our real income and expenses for every single month, and we do it while drinking a beer. And sometimes four months late. Sometimes four months late, but that's okay. Beer today is a local beer, Sandhills Brewery, which is local to Kansas City. It's an Irish red. Justine likes Irish red beers or red beers, not the tomato juice beers, but she also likes those. But this is not one of those. This is just a standard red beer. Anyways, it's quite delicious. We love it. Support your local business. It is tasty. Yeah. It's a little carbonated. Yeah, it is a little. I feel like a hoppy for an Irish red, but maybe not. No, I like it though. So we're sharing one of those. Okay. While we go over a four-month-old budget. Yeah. Five-month-old budget, four-month-old. Just about. And why are we so late on this? I don't know. Babies, baby, tongue tie, travel, house. Yeah, life. You know, one of those things. Maternity leave. So we had our second daughter, Lucy, in January, right at the tail end of a historic blizzard in Kansas City, might I add. I think we talked about that in our last beers and budgeting. And since then, I've been on a very long maternity leave, which has been awesome. Kind of being in that baby blissful bubble up until recently, Kyle kind of mentioned we're in the middle of a tongue tie release thing, which was done yesterday. So anyway, it's taken us a long time to get to our budget. However, I did go through and add up all the income, all the expenses for every single month thus far. And my promise to you is that we're going to keep filming as much as we can so that we are up to date and we are sharing what we've always talked about is financial transparency in hopes that it helps you to make your own financial decisions and be proactive about budgeting every single month. We know it's late. This is more for you than it is for us at this point. It's for us, too. I mean. I'm here for the beer. So this is really for just you, man. Okay. Thank you. Okay. This is our super budget template, which you can also purchase. I do have a free simplified version that you can start off with if you're new to budgeting. But if you're like, I really want to use what they're using. This is my super budget template that I will link for sale for you to check out and get a digital copy of this, either using Google sheets or Excel. I really like this template because very quickly we can see what money was left over for the month, what kind of debt you're dealing with. And then, of course, all of your fixed fund future and fudge expenses down below, and then a running list of your daily expenses for that particular month. But Kyle always really likes to start up at the top and look at the bottom line. And the bottom line is we had 3825 left over for February's budget. What? Yeah, it's pretty phenomenal. It's really good. So what happened this month? I feel like going back to February feels like what did we even do? Oh, yeah. Click on the actual. I mean, it's a short month, so it's not like we had extra paycheck. Well, I want to actually go over what happened at the end of the month, because we did some financial things. So the car insurance premium for the Subaru was paid in February and we pay every six months. So this past one was $306, which means we have to save $51 per month every single month for a car insurance premium for the Subaru. And if you're like, what? How is it that cheap? We have Progressive. Kyle's been like a lifelong Progressive member. I'm sure there's some sort of discounts with that. But also we know exactly how to finesse the deductible in order to decrease the premium amount. If you're like, what? Check out my car insurance video. It's old, but it still applies on how to figure out what your liability should be, collision, and if you opt in for comprehensive coverage. I think part of that, too, is it's a 2015, so it's a 10 year old car. Yeah, true. And we both work from home, so we don't put a lot of miles on it. So I think that has a big factor. We live in the boonies, so there's not a lot of traffic. True. Compared to LA, we in the boonies, yo. Yeah, different location. Another thing that happened in February is we opened a 529 plan for Lucy, and then we also officially opened one for Quinn. We had Quinn's open for a long, long time, but it was under your name because we had actually opened it prior to Quinn being born and getting a social security number for her. Yeah. So did you know you can actually open a 529 plan under your name? So we opened one under Kyle's name, and then once you have baby and baby gets a social security number, you open up a second 529 plan, and then you can transfer that over to your beneficiary, which is what we did for Quinn. Also, we have both of our 529 plans with Vanguard, and the Vanguard plans used to have a $3,000 minimum for 529 plans. Now they have lowered it to $1,000, which I feel makes it so much more accessible to people who love Vanguard index funds, but also want to use their 529 plans. And you don't have a state-sponsored plan. When we lived in California, California does not offer a state-sponsored plan, which is why we opted to go with Vanguard. And we also just really like Vanguard. So there you go. Vanguard. Sponsor me. Okay. Should we go through our fixed expenses and see how we spent money? I don't know. How did we bring in that much money? Because I'm paying myself more money. If only everyone's job was that easy. How'd you make more money? I just paid myself more money. I was very, very conservative, let's see, a year ago on paying myself. I hardly paid myself anything because I was investing a lot of money back into my business. As a result, I was getting a lot of different income streams coming in, but I was very hesitant on spending that money because I was investing. It all made sense in my head at the time, but it actually, I also had saved and set aside money for a maternity leave so that I could pay myself out. Is that making sense? Yeah. Okay. I know. It feels different than it did a year ago or even two years ago, but that's why, because I had saved so much money for that maternity leave and I don't have to save money for maternity leave ever again. Hopefully. I should say probably. Probably, definitely. Just keep going through the budget. We got like 17 more of these to do. Okay. So for February, we spent about $1,100 on preschool for our oldest kid. We had all of our other fixed expenses, which includes our utilities and insurance. We also set aside monthly money for things like property taxes, because we do not have an escrow account with our mortgage. We decided to pay taxes separately, which was a tip by your dad, by the way. We just put that money into a high yield savings account and earn interest on that money. And then the interest we get to keep. Thanks, dad. Yes. And we also pay our property taxes twice a year. That's another hack. You don't have to pay it all in one lump sum, but we do save for it monthly. Let me see how we did on groceries. I'm curious. I'm looking at this and I'm going preschool is 8% of our monthly budget. I'm curious, other people who have kids in daycare, what percentage of your income is going towards preschool daycare costs? I'm curious, because I think everyone says anywhere between 20% and 35% of your income should go towards your mortgage or rent. But what is it for daycare? Because that's kind of almost a non-controllable cost. Because you can go cheaper, sure. But there's a bottom to that. And you can always find a more expensive preschool or daycare. But I'm curious what those percentages are. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, it would be interesting. I mean, we were paying close to double that in LA. Yeah. Which is crazy. Yeah. We did great on groceries, though. We were under by 50 bucks. So that's not bad. Short month. We were about on par for home improvement and repair projects for that month. And then setting aside money monthly for HOA dues. Let's take a look at fun. Fun, we did not go out to eat, obviously. We have a newborn baby. Restaurants, shopping look good. Fun money, though. Wait. Let's take a look at the daily expense tracker and we'll find out. And then it looks like I spent some money for the kids. Everything else seems to be within normal range. What happened to the money? I see fun money and J clothing are both negative 432.59. The fact that both of those are exact tells me that there's a math. Oh, right. Just need to change this cell. Trying to cheat on your clothing budget there? There you go. So you're trying to give yourself more room to buy? That actually was that error was not in my favor. So this is this is even better. So great. Look at that line below it. Zeroes across the board. I know. Well, you had a thousand dollars set up in your sinking fund for clothing, so you don't need to add anything to it. Let's. I need to do I need to do dress belt. Oh, well, that's easy. Actually, I've flown. I've had the same suitcase for a decade and it's gone all over the world. And the Albuquerque airport is all brick. And those bricks in that Albuquerque airport just did it have just destroyed the wheels like the actual rubber fall has fallen off the hubcap, the little covers on them falling off. Like, yeah, we need to get you a new suitcase. It's like pulling it through the sand. It's not fun to pull around. I see where we ate into our fun money budget. We took a date night to a really fantastic local restaurant. Yeah, but it was really good. You had scallops. I had some of the best scallops ever had. Yeah, we had a couple of cocktails. So we really like splurged on that date. Quinn's birthday. What did we do? We went bowling. Oh, yeah. You paid for that in February. Yeah. I was like, wait, I paid for that in advance. So this is really cool because the bowling alley supplied pizza, the party favors, decorations, plates, napkins, cups, lemonade. All we had to do was show up and bring a cake. I mean, it was that easy. Like, yes, that is exactly what we needed. We had just had Lucy. Yeah. And then three months later, we were trying to figure out what to do for her birthday party. So that was fantastic. And she had a blast. So that's where the fun money stuff went. I know we set aside money for the car fund. At least we are now. I don't know if it was actually pulling out in February if that automation actually happened. Okay. So, but I can check Ally and see. Oh, yeah, car fund, $500. There it is. So I'm not sure why it didn't. Okay. So we got $2,500 saved up for a car. All right. Well, in February. In February. Yeah. And then home upgrades. The home upgrades is for things like the retaining wall in the backyard. Okay. Yep. Exactly. Quinn's college fund is like, wow, I'll take it. Yeah, that's nice. Yep. And hers, Lucy's has been stocked. And I actually stocked hers. That may have been pulled out in March, but I started hers at the same amount. So they're even. We started Quinn's at $3,000, and I also started Lucy's at $3,000. Okay. That said, there is money left over in February's budget that we can put towards home upgrades and just say, all right, $3,800, we can put towards the retaining wall in our backyard, which we desperately need when we're in the middle of doing that right now. And it's May. Or we could 50-50 it and say, hey, half of the leftover money can go to the retaining wall and half of the money can go towards the nanny fund because we did hire a nanny for Lucy. And then that'll give us some buffer while we work that into our monthly budget moving forward. Gosh, I feel like we need like a buffer bucket where it's like just a bunch of random things that we need to save for that we know are coming, but I don't know how much they're going to cost. I don't know how much to budget for them. So you kind of just got to go. So wherever's fine, however you want to do it. I mean, we got to pay it all at the end anyways. Yeah. So I'm kind of like leftover budget money to retaining wall in like May. Okay, that works. I think those are the two most dire situation things. We have a huge, I don't know, we've probably mentioned this several times, huge retaining wall in our backyard, but we need to reinforce it with another retaining wall in front of it so that we don't lose the bottom doesn't fall out essentially. Yeah. So we'll do that. Anything else for February? I feel like I have to look back in my photos to see what all happened. Nothing. We were taking care of Lucy. Yeah, we were kind of in a cocoon just trying to get to that six week peak. Yeah, I forgot about that. Wow, that went by fast. Yeah, thank God. It did. It doesn't go by fast for some folks. If you're one of those folks, glad you made it to the other side. Yeah, definitely. Because it's tough. I also did want to mention because sitting right here in front of me that while I was on maternity leave, I was working on some merch for the website and for the shop. And one of the things that I'm really proud of that came out of it was this custom notebook. Hooray. So my friend Ryan, longtime friend and graphic designer, designed this cover for me. And I love the idea of doing a custom notebook. It's blank on the inside. It's got dotted pages so that you can kind of build out a budget. You can build out a daily expense tracker. In fact, I'm going to do a video on how you could use this with different ideas using the blank pages inside. But I like having a financial notebook to be able to write down your financial goals, do a paper budget, or just kind of write out some of your ideas for future financial planning. What does retirement look like? What would you love to spend money on? So this is available in my shop if you are interested in purchasing one. I will leave a link to that below for you to check out. So I'm super stoked. It's just got really cool graphics on it that just are there to inspire you and do all the millennial money things. Okay. Like pay for a retaining wall. God, it's so boring. Yeah. Well, it's fun. Okay. That is February's budget. And we promised that we are going to do March, April, May. And we're going to get caught up on this thing because we need to. And we like to. And we're coming back to you too. Okay. Thank you. And cheers.