Over the weekend, we followed Nick True’s YNAB End of Month tutorial from Mapped Out Money and reconciled our accounts, covered overspending, and reallocated money from category to category. Even though we’ve been using YNAB for over a year, this is the first time that we’ve reconciled like this. It took me about 2 hours to go through the process, but next month, we’ll have a lot less to look through.
Now on to the numbers! Here are our January 2020 stats:
- Income: $13,014
- Expenses: $22,452 with solar, $8,635 without solar
- Savings: -$9,438 with solar, $4,378 without solar
- Savings Rate: -72% with solar, 33% without
My first take was, “Wow – that’s ugly!” Then I realized that the whole kit and caboodle was being skewed by our solar installation project. We’re paying cash for the system and self financing it from our investments. Once I took that out, the break down is more what I was hoping for.
I really struggle with how our investments should show up in the MadFientist chart. The big spike in October was from buying our rental house. Now, there’s this spike in January, because we’re making an investment in solar. We don’t do this regularly, and likely won’t do any more of this big spending in 2020, but these are expenses with uncertain rates of return.
Our expenses were up this month due to a $700 car maintenance expense for Buddy, our 2009 Honda Civic. His wheel bearing went out. I also took at trip to our rental house to do demolition and start on some of the smaller repairs. That was about $500. I also bought airfare for our girls’ trip, so that’s another $400.
Our income was also up because I got all of my vacation paid out from my job. It’s complicated, but my position was eliminated. Because of YNAB and our progress to FI, I’m not completely panicking, but I’m on the job hunt.
How has this month impacted our FI progress? If you count the solar purchase, it increased our timeline by two years and three months! Without the solar, this month shortened our FI timeline by 9 months to June 2037.
For now, I’ll keep the more conservative numbers, and see how things even out over the course of the year. How would you calculate FI? Do you have better tools?