Adjusting to One Kid

We are just finishing the first month of our son, Joey being 3,000 miles away in college. We incurred some extra expenses from shipping him some things he forgot here at home, but besides that, he has been spending his own money to participate in extracurricular activities like outdoor recreation and club sports. The first thing we noticed with Joey gone was a change in the food budget. Our grocery bill went down to $450 this month. However, with Joey being gone and Emily starting to work in the evenings after school, we noticed ourselves wanting to eat out more. We adjusted the line items in our Summit’s Climbr budget by increasing ‘dining out’ by $50 and decreasing ‘grocery’ by $400. 

Another unexpected expense this month was a big medical bill from a surgery to remove a lump they found on my breast. Since we have a big deductible, we will need to pay the entire cost of the surgery and doctor visits, up to $8,000. Before Project Money, this would have been very detrimental to our finances, but we have been consistently putting money into our Health Savings Account (HSA) so we already have almost 70% of these expenses paid off.

We are also increasing the amount of money that we put into our 401k retirement account. We wanted to increase the amount we’re putting into our retirement savings in order to decrease the amount of taxes we’re required to pay each April. While this is a positive thing, it also means the amount of money that goes into our account after each paycheck has decreased. We had to adjust our budget to manage less income each month, but it wasn’t as difficult as we thought. Each month, we usually have $500 in savings from variable expenses so we took some money from that $500 and increased the amount we were putting into our 401k. We also started an ‘August – December’ savings account, which helps us plan for birthday, anniversary and holiday expenses.