Millennial Parent Trials | May 2025 Beers & Budgeting

Hey guys, we're back. We're still married. We still love each other. We hope. Oh, stick around. We are doing May's beers and budgeting. All right, welcome back to the channel. DFM headquarters here. This is my husband, Kyle. Sup? I'm Justine. I usually do those intros reverse of that. But anyway, we are here to do May's budget and we are going to be drinking a beer while we do it. So, what are we drinking? I went with a German style Pilsner today. Yes. Bitburger. If there's a German on there, you can tell us how bad we're pronouncing that. But you know, German beers have a very distinct taste. It's, I was kind of craving it and it was on sale. And after $370 on picture frames, we need to buy things that are cheaper than normal. So, this is the, this is a nice and light, crisp. It's getting hot outside, so. Tastes like Europe. Does. It's good. I like that. I wish we were in Europe. That would be really nice. Yup. Alas, we are not. We are going to be- We're in Kansas instead. We are in Kansas and the summer is like super hot right now. We just hit 90 degree weather, high humidity, all the fun stuff. All right, so we've got May's budget pulled open here. Okay. Looks like we planned on bringing in 13,000. We actually brought in 14,450, leaving us with almost 2,200 bucks left over. Yup. And you were reimbursed for the work trip that you took in April. So, there's the difference. So, that's the difference there. Our second half of our property tax payment was due for May. So, that was $3,345. We set up a sinking fund for that. So, that has been paid. We also knew that the HOA dues were due in June, $880 per year, which actually increased from the previous year. So, now we're paying $74 per month for HOA dues. We bought new garage door openers, which have been just, why didn't we do that sooner? Such a random thing to enjoy. Our kid's room is right below the garage doors. I mean, it would sound like you were in a freight train when those things would go up. It was wildly loud. So, for some reason, I'm oddly satisfied with garage door openers. Oh, I am too. Well, in just learning that the chain drive versus a belt drive, the belt drive is going to be much quieter than a chain, and learning about all the ends of garage door openers that are expensive. I mean, for what we paid in our level of happiness, I feel like yes, but it was 1,000 bucks at the end of the day, right? Was it $1,000? Yeah, between buying both of them and then paying for install. Yeah, paying for install, exactly, yep. Yeah, I mean, you know, not everyone has $1,000 to spend on garage doors, so. That is a nice luxury, and it is beautiful, and I love it. And if you got the spare change and you're debating about it, you won't be disappointed. We went with the Chamberlain's. It is the smart camera belt drive, three-quarter horsepower. Well. At Menards, get yourself a rebate. Do you know how to calculate three-quarter horsepower? I don't. You wanna let us in? Stay tuned for another video. No, I'm just kidding. Nobody wants to know that. Okay, anyway, that was the big news of May. We also had moved some of the funds. Oh, I put, move funds from nanny fund to checking for end of month for, now that we have a nanny sinking fund, we've been moving money over for that. Anyway, that was a little side note. Okay, shall we get into the nitty gritty? Yeah. Okay. Everything looks good. Gas, okay, natural gas has gone way up and I'm not entirely sure why that is, especially for May, April. I gotta look into this. Was that when? 140, 118. I'm just kinda seeing what the trend has been over the last couple of months. $80 for February. The rates don't stay the same throughout the year, so. We need to look at what the rate change is. It also could be we were baking more. At one point, our oven, we had to buy an oven thermometer to figure out what the actual temperature was of the oven and that took some extra time. Yeah. We had people come, maybe baking more things. We hooked up the natural gas line outside. That. Which I'm curious if the natural gas line outside hopefully doesn't have a little leak in it or something. It shouldn't though, because we got two valves on it. But I don't know if it's just running the grill is using that much more gas. It is nice though to have the grill hooked up to the natural gas line, because then you just turn it on and boom, there it is. I mean, not that much different than using the propane tank. The only difference is we don't have to go refill it and it just saves us extra time. Yeah, but at the same time, if it's costing us an extra 50 bucks a month, that, you know. That's not bad. We'll go back to propane, because that's definitely not a good savings. Yeah. So let me make a note of that here. Notes. Check gas charges. We paid for water this month. Water is billed to us every other month. We were pretty much right on budget for that. Can't believe it's $176 for water, but I guess that's for two months, right? 90 bucks a month still seems quite high, but we have a lawn and plants and stuff. Yeah, I don't know. We didn't even start. I've only watered the grass one time in May. So there's more guests coming and more showers. I guess so. Still kind of blows my mind, but that's that. Groceries, again, we were over. I'm like, do we just need to increase the grocery budget? Again? Or do I need to make some changes to what we're buying? And when I say changes, do I need to cancel the HelloFresh subscription? Are we ready to do that? By the way, I think there's a box outside on our front set for HelloFresh I just remembered. It's probably baking in the sun right now. You think it's just more carrots? No. Like every single meal they send us, they want us to eat some fricking carrots. And I'm like, I don't have anything against carrots, but twice a week for four weeks in a row, I'm just like, I'm kind of tired of carrots, guys. I know it's a good profit margin maker for you because it has a long shelf life, but let's do better. Okay. So maybe that's something that we should eliminate. How much does HelloFresh cost us? So it initially started out with an intro of like $76 a week and now it's up to 90, because the discount is only applied to your first X amount of boxes. So that's $400 a month? Mm-hmm. Oh, sure, ouchie. Yeah. Yeah, time to cancel. No. When I was doing the calculations to see if this was worth it or not, because we get the four servings per meal and we do two meals, so that's eight meals. And then when I was dividing it out, it's about $11 per serving, per meal. The servings aren't even that large. They're not that large. What you're paying for is the convenience of getting the food delivered to you. Yeah. And I think that's why the per serving amount is higher than what it would be if you were to buy the ingredients and make it yourself. Now, we're doing this as a way to help us transition into being a family of four. And I was on maternity leave, and so it made it really hard to go out with the baby and meal prep and all that stuff. So it may be that June might be our last month to do HelloFresh, and then we start, I start meal prepping. But it could save us $400. Just the way we run our house, Justine cooks most of the meals, and I clean most of the meals. So that's kind of our, it works for us. Yeah. Do what works for you. You're gonna see over here, spent from sinking fund, the property taxes that I mentioned. We had some car expenses. I believe we got an oil change for the Kia for May, and we did the Subaru for June. Home improvement, we spent $237 there. If I go down here, and by the way, if you guys are using the super budget template, it is available for sale. Did you know you can download your credit card transactions as a CSV, copy paste into your daily expense tracker, and then filter, and you can filter by categories. And I have a whole tutorial video on the channel for you to check out. It's a 40 minute tutorial. So you definitely wanna check that out if you're gonna purchase this template that we're using. So if I go down to home repairs, home improvement and repairs, this is where all of that lives, right here. Oh, I put the garage door openers as a home upgrades. So that was $635. It was definitely an upgrade. And then a couple of Home Depot trips, Lowe's trips. Road ads. There, there you go. And then the car expenses, got the oil changed, and then did one car wash. I'm like, go back, go back, go back, go back, go back. $16 for a car wash? Yeah, and that's one of the lower tiered options. The highest tier is like 25, I wanna say, where you get everything, everything. How much is a car wash for you? Like, tell us where you're at and how much a car wash is. Yeah, let us know, city and, you know. Am I being that guy, or is like, that seemed expensive? Let us know, I'm curious. Well, self-serve, I think, should be like half that, right? You go into self-serve and it would be eight bucks, maybe. But this is like, you're running through. And I will say, when it came out, I wasn't like, oh, it missed spots. I felt like it did a good job. Okay. So, there you go. Let's keep going up from the top. Address that, address that. Let's go to fun money. I feel like restaurants, we've been really good at restaurants lately. But that's always what happens, every time. If we're good on restaurants, we're bad on groceries. If we're good on groceries, we're bad on restaurants. Yeah, that's true. But I say that because I feel like we do consistently eat out. I feel like where we do a really good job is we're doing happy hours or we're doing something that's cheaper. Mm-hmm, yeah, you're not gonna have sushi every day. Yeah, okay, the rest of these were spent from the rest of our fun budget is really just a bunch of sinking funds. They're all sinking funds. So, we spent money from those sinking funds. Do you wanna go through each one of these? I don't know. Do I have to? Well, we can see here what the totals are. 377 for shopping, $400 on fun money, $142 for my clothing. You didn't spend any money on clothing. 150 for Quinn money, $200 for Lucy money, haircut, gifts. Wait, what did we spend? I didn't have $410 worth of fun last month. See, this is why we go through it. All right, fun money. I included any kind of golf, coffee shops, breweries, and then any kind of snacky type things that we did. We did a date night to one of the best sushi places in Kansas City. Yes. We agreed. June's Sushi in Prairie Village. I'm telling you, if you live in Kansas City and you've not tried June's, you absolutely have to go. It's so good. We went to a Kansas City Monarchs game and we bought tickets for that. So, that was $273. Now, we- No, you got June's highlighted in there. Oh, thank you. I was like, $273. $130, $128, which is, I think, pretty good because we bought four tickets and we bought snacks and beers and ice cream that Quinn absolutely hated. So frustrated by that. She wanted it so badly. She was just like pulling at my arm, just like, daddy, daddy, I want that, I want that, I want that. She sees it in the cup and she's just like, I don't want that. This isn't what was in the picture. Oh, man. You were having just a very, yeah, you were not happy. But Monarchs itself is such a fun little stadium to go to. It's a great little outing for us. I absolutely want to do it again before the summer's over. So, that's part of the fun money spending. We went to a brewery, a couple of breweries. So, that's where I put it because I'm like breweries, to me, is not really a restaurant. It's kind of fun stuff to do because most of the time we're drinking there. Okay. Yeah, I guess, for me, the date night coming out of the fun money, I mean. Yeah. I get it now, okay. Yeah, we used to have a separate savings account specifically for date nights and then we kind of fell off the wagon and then I'm like, oh, let's just lump it into fun money. Deal. All right, okay. Anything else that you want to go over for fun money? Nope, no more fun. Okay. I know one of the reasons why Lucy's category was so expensive is because we bought $170 worth of formula. It's expensive formula, but it's gonna last us a long time. So, I would say Lucy is what, 90% breast milk? Yeah. 10% formula right now. But it's so nice to have as a backup just in case if she needs something, we need something real quick. So, combo feeding for her has been really, really good for us and for me too. It takes the pressure off of me. So, that's why hers was so expensive. Quinn, we did gymnastics. Oh yeah, we did and she got some little odds and ends. We got her an alarm clock, which we are loving. She was getting out of bed early, like 6, 6.15 a.m. And we're like, nope, nope. So, now we got a kid's alarm clock that will light up green when it's time to get out of bed and we've set that for 7 a.m. It's really nice, especially on the weekends. Yes. So, we paid for that, paid for monthly gymnastics. We also paid for this kid's bowl free thing. I found out about this. If your city is participating in it, you can sign up your child to bowl for free. All you have to pay for are the shoes and then you can add a family plan in it. So, if you wanna add like mom and dad or a grandparent, then you just add them for like a set fee. So, ours was $40 for the season and we could add four adults. Cool. We should do that this weekend. Okay. Yes. Yes, we should do that this weekend. Okay. That's the kid's fun money where that money was coming out of. I think everything looks okay here for fun. You had another work trip in May. So, that money came out. It'll most likely be reimbursed for June. And then we had the garage door openers expense from the home upgrades fund. And then these are the categories for all of our different sinking funds for the future. So, Quinn's College Fund, Lucy's College Fund, Vacation Car Fund, Home Upgrades, that sort of thing. Hey, the car fund, up to four grand. I could rebuy my first car again. Huh. Is that how much it costs? Yeah. Your Jimmy? My Jimmy, yes. GMC Jimmy? They don't make those anymore, huh? No. I don't know why they call it Jimmy. It's kind of a... Weird name. Yeah. A person's name. Yeah. Should not say a weird name. Okay. That's a weird name for a car. Yeah. And then our investments. They had all gone down slightly. I am not surprised. Imagine that. Yeah. They had all gone down. So, yeah. My IRAs, our brokerage account, we still have our Robinhoods, Stash and Betterment. There you go. Cool. We do need, or I need your latest payroll stuff so that I can add in your deductions. Can do. What do you want to do with the money left over? That retaining wall hasn't paid for it yet. Do we sound like a broken record? I know, right? Trying to just get people to update quotes for you is just tearing up my hair. Yeah. We'll get there. That's what I would say, just nanny fun and... And retaining wall? Yeah. Yeah, we really are on a repeat of putting our extra money towards those two funds. But they're needed. Okay. Good deal. Cool. That wasn't so bad, was it? Okay, good. Because he's talking about last month. Yeah. Well, if you didn't catch April's episode, then go watch it and you'll see why we keep referring to it. Also, if you are loving Debt Free Millennials and you want to support your favorite channel this summer with a hat, we have the vintage tool hats in denim and there's a pink one. Kyle's sporting the snapback flat bill hat. They're really awesome. Go support us, maybe from the small margin of profit that we get from these. A dollar. It's like, yeah, it's like two bucks a sell. It's fine. Maybe we could go buy another beer somewhere and showcase it here on the channel. So tell us, if you purchase a hat, email me and then tell me which beer we should feature next. Hopefully it's one that is carried here locally. And maybe we will just give you a shout out in another future episode. There you go. That note, cheers. Thank you.