Fire to Wander

Follow along as I document my journey to early retirement and a nomadic lifestyle.

My Goal Yearly Budget

I would love to get to the point where I no longer need to budget. I don’t usually track my spending very closely because I know that in the year I will very likely stick to my original plan.

I was putting together my spending post for September and I’m not even finished because since I stopped tracking my spending with an app over a year ago, it’s hard for me to go in to each credit card and manually download the transactions. I have eleven credit cards. I don’t want to close any of them since it’s good for my credit to keep the longest one open, even though that’s the shitty one. The limit is too low for me to want to use it. So every three months I have a recurring charge that goes on that one, just to keep it active. But when putting my expenses together, I have to go track down all of these things.

Rather than posting an incomplete picture, I will post what my ideal monthly budget is. I am only telling you what I shoot for and not what is “correct” or anything like that. One thing to note is that although this is what I aim for, essentially the main thing I care about is enjoying my life and also investing as much as possible so that I no longer have to work. I don’t want to post a monthly budget because it would vary wildly month to month. I will be posting monthly updates on my spending though.

This is what I’m hoping my breakdown looks like at the end of the year.

I should note that Living includes everything I need to live: housing, utilities, food, transportation, health expenses. Enjoyment is anything that makes my life enjoyable, a big chunk is travel but also tea, alcohol, fun events, gifts and that sort of thing.

Investments are both Pre-tax and After tax. The savings will mainly be used to fund my year off.

In order to keep myself accountable, I think I’ll start actually looking at my numbers on a monthly basis and posting updates on those. I just realized waiting months to look at them makes the process much more tedious than it has to be. Perhaps at the end of the year I’ll post a comparison of last year’s numbers vs this year’s.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *