Budget Porn: October 2017

October has come and gone, and so have all three groups of trick-or-treaters who visited our house this Halloween. 

In our old neighborhood, so many kids came that we often had to head out for an extra bag of candy. Now, we apparently live in a hood populated exclusively by childless couples, the elderly, and dentists.

On the plus side, we are Kit Kat rich.

Today we'll take a break from our regularly scheduled liberal propaganda to check in on our spending from October, and to see how we're trending towards financial independence.

This is the breakdown of what we spent in October:

Total October Spend: $3,870

Non-Mortgage Spend: $2,312

Annual Spend YTD: $40,530

Forecast for 2017 Spend: $48,636

The outliers this month were spending nearly five hundred bucks on the fees associated with Mrs. Done by Forty's PhD program. While her tuition and health insurance are generously covered with her R.A. position, which also happens to pay a pretty sweet stipend, we are responsible for the university fees twice a year, covering everything from athletics to technology.

The other big expense was home improvement, as we decided to overseed our lawn. You see, here in the preposterous desert of Arizona, the grass that survives our summer (bermuda) goes dormant in the winter. If you want a green lawn in the winter months, you actually have to plant a winter lawn, which involves mowing the lawn short, raking out all the thatch, throwing a bunch of rye seed down, and covering it with a soil topper. It's a huge pain in the ass.

But we're in a new house, and we like having a green lawn...even if that involves me busting my hump for a couple weekends, paying for the seed and topper, and guaranteeing a ridiculous water bill come December. Sorry, Mother Gaia.

The backyard right after putting the seed & topper down

A couple weeks later, Cayenne is ensuring that we can't have nice things.

We are still adjusting to the new, larger mortgage. I get the feeling we're going to trend towards something around $50k so long as we have that bill hanging around.

I'm actually okay with that on paper. The plan right now is to basically copy the 1500 Days plan: to get a million into investments, and to save up an additional amount equal to our mortgage, but to keep the actual mortgage around because low-interest debt can be a good thing, especially over 30 years of opportunity costs.

But as someone who'd previously paid off a mortgage and been entirely debt-free, I can certainly see the advantage of the Root of Good plan. Paying off the mortgage might have opportunity costs, but it also would bring our annual expenses back down below $40,000 and eliminate a decent amount of risk.

For now, we can entertain both options. I'm still leaning towards the 1500 Days plan because over 30 years (or, say, 27 years after we reach financial independence), $250k will do a lot better in the market while carrying a roughly 4% mortgage, than it would had we just used the money to be debt free. And if we change our mind down the line, we can always pay off the debt later. But once it's paid off, getting money out of the house is easier said than done, especially if we leave traditional employment.

This sure seems like a problem for future Brian. 

For today, we can enjoy the fact that, even with our higher annual spending, we are trending towards still reaching financial independence before I'm forty:

Still on track, but with just two months to spare.

The spiky 2017 has pushed our rolling twelve month average much higher, but I suspect that this average is a lot closer to reality than we'd like to admit.

Our ace in the hole is the fact that Mrs. Done by Forty will graduate soon and, like me, wants to pursue some sort of career regardless of our financial status. While no one has a crystal ball, our income is likely to spike right as we approach financial independence, and it's pretty likely that both of us will have at least some sort of part-time income going forward anyway.

Which all goes to say, we are crazy fortunate. We are a exploding cornucopia of privilege, as evidenced by the fact that we're even talking about the possibility of working just because we feel like it at the ripe old ages of forty and thirty four. We're both very lucky to have degrees, and to be three-quarters white and one quarter Asian between the two of us, and to be healthy Americans, to boot. We have fortune falling out of our butts over here.

I have a lot more to say on this in a future post, but for now, if you're reading this and maybe thinking that the author is a lucky mofo, you are not wrong. I am. I owe the world quite a debt and I get the feeling that whatever I plan to do in this next stage of life, that debt-repayment ought to be part of it.

If you have some ideas on that, please let me know in the comments below. And as always, thanks for reading.