Income & Expenses For October 2017

Since 2014, I have been tracking my monthly income and expenses. You can see a breakdown of every penny I earn and spend. For perspective, this budget is for a household of two in a small US city. By documenting my journey, I aim to demonstrate the feasibility of saving a significant portion of your income and provide some ideas and inspiration for your own budget.

Below are my income and expenses for October 2017. You can see all my monthly budgets here.

	Oct 2017
Income
Wages	$13,171.36
Dividends	$909.34
Other Income	$154.49
Total Income	$14,235.19
Expense
Federal Income Tax	$1,454.58
Federal Tax Pmt/(Refund)
FICA-SS	$427.02
FICA-Medicare	$99.87
Housing	$450.00
Student loan repayment	$35.70
Food	$82.71
Cell phone	$12.28
Electric	$33.00
Total Expense	$2,595.16
Ex-Tax Total Expense	$613.69
Surplus/(Deficit)	$11,640.03
Before Tax Saving Rate	81.77%
After Tax Saving Rate	94.99%

Income
Wages remain my primary source of income by far. 

Here is a chart of my dividend income by month for the past 13 months:

Total dividends for the trailing twelve months: $15,742.51, up 19.7% from a year ago.

Expense
Expenses were kept low this month. Unfortunately, housing cost, my biggest expense, will go up by $50 starting next month. This represents an 11% increase in my rent, about which I am unhappy but can do nothing. I am expected to move next summer to another work location which will hopefully lower my housing expense.

Total expenses for the trailing twelve months: $9,990.56, up 6.35% from a year ago.

Dividend to expense coverage ratio = 1.58, another new high! 

The chart below shows my TTM dividend (red line) versus TTM expense (blue line) since I started tracking in 2014. Ideally, the dividend line should stay well above the expense line and increase with time at a faster pace than the expense line. On this metric, I have not been doing too badly, but would like to put more distance between the two lines in order to afford me more freedom.

Savings
My after-tax saving rate was 94.99% for the month of October 2017, exceeding my 90% saving rate target. I am confident that my saving rate will average above 90% for the remainder of the year.


Thanks for reading!