Hidden Purchases Kyle Didn't Know About April 2025 Beers & Budgeting

Hey, we told you that we would be rolling with the beers and budgeting episodes, so stick around. We are doing April and we are going to be drinking a really good beer while we're at it. Stick around. Hey guys, welcome back to the channel. I'm your host Justine. This is my husband Kyle. What's up? And today we are going over April's budget. This was a big month. I hope you have a really tasty beer for us to drink. Is that an indicator of how bad the budget is or how much you trust my beer tasting? My beer connoisseurism. Is connoisseurism the word? Yeah. Anyways, I'm going to make it a word today. Okay. Because today our consumerism or connoisseurism is a little transparent brewing, which is local here to, well, I guess it's Missouri, not Kansas, but it's a Kolsch. It's 90 degrees outside and then 90% humidity, getting to the great summertime. So it's a light, crisp beer, almost looks like white wine or apple cider. It does look like apple cider. And I like the can design too. I was going to say the same thing. I like the color. Oh, I do like that. Yeah. I was going to say, we started this off before we started recording by having a disagreement about her not liking Kolsch's and I'm like, yes, you do. And she's like, no, I don't. Yes, you do. No, you don't. I've had, well, it says Kolsch style ale. So I don't know if that's different than. Some places make better beers than others. This is a better beer than others. Okay. I've just maybe had some really dank Kolsch's. Some that have sat on the shelf too long. Yeah. And so that's what I was like, I don't think I like that, but this is really good. This is really good. And it's perfect. It's crisp, refreshing. And so is our budget skills. So let's hop into April's and see what we got going on. April is obviously a very big financial month for a lot of people because you're paying your taxes. And guess what we did? Overpaid on taxes. We overpaid on taxes. It's funny because we're either on one end of the pendulum or the other, whether we, we owe a ton of money or getting back a ton of money. We're not very good at being in the middle. Well, historically we have owed a lot of money and this is the first year in, I can't tell you how long that we actually got a very large refund. How much did we get back? We got $13,140 back. And mind you, when we did March's budget, I'm pretty sure we also had a $949 tax refund as well. So you're talking about 14 grand in total. $1,200 a month extra in our budget that we could have used that for. Exactly. Did we earn interest on that since we loaned that money out or did we loan that money out for free? According to our former CPA, you do get a little bit of an interest, but I'm like, how much is that? You're definitely not getting anything near what you would be earning in a high yield savings account or investing in the stock market. So we got a massive tax refund, which contributed to a very large income month, which also meant that we had $12,677 left over. Yeah, sure. So I'm looking at this as like that tax return thing. That's almost like not even included in the monthly budget for me. So if we didn't bring in the 13,000, from the tax refund, would we have been in budget? Let's see. No. We would have been negative $463. And now I want to focus on that, on why did we go over on the budget $463 because that's like a lot. Okay. Well, a couple of notes here is that we had a lot of visitors in April. We had two different sets of friends come and visit. We had your parents come and visit. There was, I put this note, big alcohol purchase when friends were in town and a $500 Costco trip that sent us over budget. And a hundred dollars of that was just on diapers, pull-ups and wipes. That also is contributing to some of the budget mayhem that's happening in April. Let's take a look down at the fixed expenses to show you what is happening. The groceries was over budget by almost $800. We almost doubled our grocery budget. Is that just because we had visitors? Yeah. So let me go down to, I organized this by category and this is all of our grocery household related purchases, including alcohol. So I highlighted some of the things in yellow that I felt like were a little unusual, such as, you know, $140 essentially going towards just alcohol alone. And then the $500 Costco trip and then all of the little odds and ends of purchasing groceries. Now I know because we had people come and stay with us that contributed to such a higher budget for the groceries. And then we spent some money on home improvement. I feel like that's always going to be a regular expense for us now. And then one thing that I, I changed for this template moving forward is before I didn't have this column for spent from sinking fund. So this is going to make it cleaner for every single category that we set aside monthly amounts of money for, and that we roll over into the next month and not necessarily spending from it. We can track what we're rolling over and what we're spending from each of the sinking funds. That pertains specifically for the fund money category where we're consistently just saving money, setting aside money for those particular categories, and then pulling from that sinking fund when we've spent the money. So for shopping. So is that a running total that we spent on this fiscal year or this calendar year? Well, yes, it updates every single month as it rolls forward. So as of April for shopping, we've spent $737 total on the year. No, no, that's $737 in the month. What was that on? Let's go find out. We're still paying for Kindle. I don't even know where the Kindle's at. That's a Kindle. That's a digital book. The Kindle's in, in the office, in my office right behind you. Okay. So I spent some money at Ikea, spent $370 at Quince, which are sheets, Marshalls, books, Amazon, Kohl's. Kohl's, this is, this is kid stuff. I'm pretty sure. You're just done silencing. Yeah. It's not reassuring. No. Okay. This is why we have a sinking fund though. So what we do is we roll over the money. We add $500. Then we subtract what we actually spent. And this is, this is the total. Okay. Tell me what you're thinking. Why do sheets cost $300? Yeah. They're, they're nice sheets. Is that a tariff problem? I mean, what the hell? They're nice sheets. Okay. Okay. Do you want to keep going? Yeah. Okay. Fund money, we spent $350 there. Let's go down to fund money. We went to Deanna Rose of, of farm, Deanna Rose farm with our friends. That's why you're seeing all these charges for that. We went and spent money and did a date night, a double date night with our friends and went to union station, Jay Rieger. And then also the Seat Geek, we spent money to go to the sporting Casey game. Are you counting money that gets Venmoed to you for things like half of the tickets? Yes, I believe I should have that in there, but I'll double check. Cause I don't see my Venmo on the half of that from our friend. Okay. I spent money on clothing. You spent money on clothing, Lucy. You spent $264 on clothing. What did you buy? Well, I, we are getting into it. I feel like we, uh, turned on the fund money budget. Okay. Target, um, swimsuits, T shirts for me, swimsuit and a swimsuit coverup. Man, stuff is just expensive now. I look at, you know, you commented on the alcohol stuff too. And it's like, some of these breweries want 20 bucks for a four pack of beer. And I'm just like, I can't, I can't justify that. Just everything is so expensive anymore. Yeah, it is. Which is why we have our sinking funds in place. I mean, imagine if we didn't, we'd be over on a lot of this stuff. Oh yeah. I bought her clothes. She's been moving up sizes rapidly. Got a baby monitor and a little noise canceling headphones for her. Okay. Let's keep going. Gifts, health. Okay. Everything else looks fine. You're also going to see this negative $1,300 because you went on a work trip in April and that's how much was spent on hotel, food, whatever the heck else that you were doing there. Um, that gets reimbursed to us. I'm assuming in may, is it usually like you submit your receipts for reimbursement at the end of the trip and then it gets, it takes a week or two or something like that to get reimbursed. I don't remember, but yeah, I know that we've got, I know I got reimbursed for it. Okay. Uh, down to the future home upgrades. We've been setting aside a thousand dollars for that mainly for this retaining wall that we're trying to build. We spent $370 out of that and that was Michael's stores. That was artwork. Where's it at? It's hanging above our bed. Dude, you spent to frame those? Yeah. No. Oh dude. I am not okay with that. I think Kyle, we need to talk about that before you went ahead with that. I think Kyle needs like extra beers. Yeah, no dude. We, we talk about big expenses like that, especially for things that are nice to have 370 on picture frames. Yeah. It was absolutely ridiculous. Then why did you do it? Here we are like wrapping it up, putting it onto the countertop. We're talking about the measurements and everything. I've got a crying baby who's just not consolable. And so she goes to tell me the price and I'm like, seriously, Lucy's crying. I'm not sure what to do. So I'm just like, F I B I like, just let's get it done and move on. But all, all framing places are like mad expensive right now. Dude, I'll frame it myself. I know. I know I'm kicking myself because I thought I should totally have had you frame it. Yeah. And you do that as a project. Oh man. That's 370. We're not getting back. Yeah, no. I'm gonna need more beer. Okay. That's pretty rough, babe. Yeah. So they didn't give you a quote ahead of time to be like, yeah, it's about 300 bucks. No. The lady behind the counter was just like, I think it was her second week working there. Just she got the quote incorrect the first time. The first time she quoted me was half, half that. And I was like, okay, I suppose thinking it's a custom size and everything like that. Yeah. I should have had you just build it yourself. It is what it is. It's done. Like moving forward. Now we'll know this is a way that we could save money is by DIYing. Yeah. Okay. What else? I don't know. I'm like distracted now. Yeah. That's fine. I'd really like to get our mork agenda a half a million dollars. I don't know if we can take something and get it underneath that or not, but I just hate seeing a five at the front of it. So obviously we got to take out of our tax return to make up the difference for this month, the $400 loss. Yeah. And the rest of it, I feel like is going to go to that fun retaining wall in the backyard that still isn't done. It's not even started. Not even started yet. Still getting quotes retaining wall. Yeah. Nanny fund. Yeah. I think we're gonna have to have an artwork fund now. No, I don't think so. Yeah. This month was kind of wild. Okay. Are you okay? Oh man. Well, we just agree that on big purchases, we usually come to agreement first. We do. So we do. You're right. Yeah. I don't know. I'm just not a frivolous person. So like artwork is something that I'm like, you know, there's a lot of cheap artwork out there that looks pretty good. You can do artwork yourself in, you know, it's a lot of this abstract stuff you can just do yourself and have a good time at it. Sure. So that's me. I just look at it as like, that's $370 to we could have put down towards a lot of things that need worked on in the house and just those kinds of expenses where like, what's my return on joy for that $370. I don't think they look any different when they didn't have the frames on them. So I still think they look the same almost where it's like, okay, we, we, we dropped, you know, money on new garage doors, you know, a new garage door is $370. And I'm like, I love the new garage door. I use it every day. It's nice and quiet. You know, that's a good return on my joy. You got to save that for the next month. That's when we bought that in May. But yeah, I hear you. I understand. You're right. We definitely need to talk to each other before purchases. That was my bad. Getting the mortgage down under 500 K. Like we definitely have tax money for that, but I just don't know. That's just because you're, it's hard for you to see that number still be at 500 a year later. Yeah. So, but that's not the priority right now. The priority is some of these other home upgrade fixes that we need to do. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, my favorite, not my favorite. It's not his favorite episode, but the important thing is, is we're talking about it. We're laying it all on the table. Yeah. No secrets. Even though that wasn't fun for like me to relive and you to find out, like we got to move past it and talk about it. So strike that, reverse it. Deal. Okay. Let's drink our beers and reset and we'll catch you hopefully in another episode.