2016 Spending Report

I must be a personal finance geek, because I've been excited about this post for quite some time. I kept wishing for the year to end just so I could tally up all of our expenses. I will probably do this monthly going forward, both for your entertainment and to make sure we are sticking somewhat close to our budget. On to the numbers...

As you can see, we did pretty well this year. We reduced our spending from the last three years by almost $10,000, although almost all of that came from estimated tax savings. Pretty much all other categories were pretty close to previous years, and even close to our theoretical retirement budget (which I need to update to be slightly more realistic).

The one category that blew up this year was home improvement. That's because we installed solar panels, which would have been a great long term investment if we weren't moving, and we remodeled our kitchen in order to get top dollar for the house when we sell it.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with how we did this year, and I continue to be confident we can meet our retirement budget going forward.

How was your spending in 2016? Did you stay on budget?


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