Tag Archives: Financial Progress Report

2012 Money Goals, 1st Quarter Expenses

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Expenses

As you can tell, March was expensive (Created in GnuCash)

  •  My Car – You should be able to tell that March was a bad month car wise. At the beginning of March a bad storm came to where I live at and it threw a plastic lid through my back windshield, and side window, and busted out another one. In addition I pay my insurance in 3-month increments and March was the month. In February you see a good month, less then half spent on my car, which is what I try to do.
  • Drinks/Snacks – This also include food along with when I go out to eat. Which I try to spend less then $60 on, but sometimes it doesn’t work that way since I’ll overspend.
  • Books – I am a college student and for the Spring 2012 term I bought all but one off of Amazon, but that was in December and a few didn’t ship until January.
  • Phones/Cellphones – Right now I pay around $50-$60 a month for my Prepaid Phone. In the past there was times I paid $70 and other times I would pay $20. But now it’s pretty predictable.
  • Other(s) – This is just a catch all for misc. items and to make the graph easier to read.

Budgeting

I used to be on a budget and part of it was savings. As you can tell from the last post, I haven’t been keeping up with that goal. Which the goals I had set are going to be the basis of my budget. I want to try to keep Drink/Snacks down to $60 along with trying to pay off my debt and increase my saving. But that will be a topic for another day.

2012 Money Goals, 1st Quarter Savings, Debt, & Income

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Savings

  • Emergency Fund – As I said earlier I have yet to start back on saving in my Emergency Fund. It currently sits at five dollars.
  • Taxes – I just recently paid Estimated taxes to the tune of 450, with about another hundred still in the account. Only time will tell if this was enough.
  • Slush Fund – Need to set this up. By next quarter I hope to have an account established.
  • Place to live – here’s the really dumb part on my move. I have 3,750 but it’s mostly from Student Aid that I have managed not to spend.

Debt

  • Student Loans – The original loan was for $5,500. The current principal is  $5,299.77. Which mean $200 is paid off of the $750 goal. The only bad part is I have about $60 in interest that I have not paid yet.
  • Credit Card – I only have a $200 credit limit and my last bill was for $0 and currently I only have a $3 balance from Saturday. So on using it less I am making progress.

Income

  • My business which is Computer Repair and Programming seams to be on track. After doing the quarterly book work it’s at $4,505.67. Which my goal is $20,000. So it’s almost a quarter of what I expected. Yet the last two/three weeks have been slow and may explain why it’s not $5,000. But I can live with that.
  • Passive Income – Have yet to establish any, I have been reading blogs, books, and listening to shows on that topic. Lets see if I can get this going soon.

Noticeable Quarter Events

This quarter has been an interesting one. First time I’ve installed a security camera system, which was a good learning experience. Always wear dust masks when working with ceilings and walls. But onto some bad events. The beginning of March there was a bad storm which busted out three windows on my Ford Explorer. The repair bill was around $700 but my parents chipped in, which helped a lot. Had my parents not chipped in and with virtually no Emergency Fund this could have been much worst.

Now you may be asking me, where’s the expenses? I haven’t had much time to analyse my expenses yet but I can say more was spent on my Explorer then any other category. I will make a new post when I’ve done that.

And as always, feel free to comment below. I want to hear your comments and suggestions. If you like this post make sure to subscribe to the feed at the bottom of the site. Thanks and I hope to hear from you soon.

– Zack

Also, on a side note, today I’m 19. With the extra money from gifts I hope to not blow them. I would really like to pay off some debt and/or save but I need to at least make sure I don’t blow it on food and stuff I never use. Finally I am expecting a slight increase in one of my Subcontracting Job and I plan on using half of the excess to pay debt and the other half to fund savings. Which should amount to about $50 for each category per month.

2012 Money Goals

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With the first quarter of 2012 coming to a close, I will be sharing with you my financial progress report. But first, I should explain what my goals are. Listed below are my simple goals for 2012 organized by category.

Savings

  • Have two months living expenses in a savings account. I.e. an Emergency Fund. For me this would be about $1000. In the past I’ve had a much smaller E. Fund, but my income was to low one month and I have yet to build it back up.
  • Make sure I am setting back money for Taxes, I am learning this the hard way on my 2011 Taxes. My goal on this for 2012 is to owe less then $100.
  • Have a slush fund of sorts – I have a few expenses I always forget to plan for (Oil changes, web hosting, etc) My goal for 2012 is to get the big offenders out of a slush fund.
  • Finally, I want to have money saved up for a place to live. From my last post you can tell I would much rather start small and pay for the house outright. But at the moment it looks like I may have to rent until I get enough saved.

Debt

  • The only debt I have currently is a student loan. I hope to have at least $750 of the principal paid off by the end of 2012. I really wish it would be paid off by December, so I may throw some extra money into it.
  • I do have a credit card, but it’s a secured credit card with a $200 limit. It gets paid off every month if I use it and in 2012 I hope to use this card less. When I first got the card I placed $120 on it and since the start of 2012 it hasn’t been over $60.

Income

  • I own a business and I really hope to have it take off this year. In 2012 my business grossed about 10k or 11k. Almost half of that is from subcontracted services. In 2012 I want to see my business pass the $20,000 in gross sales mark.
  • I also want to diversify my income and for 2012 I want to start having passive income. I am not sure what I’ll do yet, but I would like to set a goal of having $250/mo by the end of 2012.

Expenses

  • I plan to sit down at the end of this quarter and examine all the money that I paid out and find ways to reduce it and to make a budget. I used to follow a budget but then I got a car and it just went out the window.
  • This is in relation to savings also. But the money I don’t spend on an Item I want to start saving away. I used to buy snacks and pop often and I would like to add to my savings every time I get the temptation, instead of buying.

Well that’s my 2012 Money Goals as of right now. Make sure you check back in Mid April for my first quarter financial report to see how much or little progress I have made.