January 2018 Spending and Passive Income Update

Hi everyone!  Mr. DebtFree here with the January 2018 edition of our spending and passive income update.  While we did not quite hit our spending goals (we just love food too much) they are still in line with spending from previous months.  Here are our numbers for January 2018!

The increased numbers in our shopping category mainly include some items to update our home.  We bought multiple different organizers and cabinets to re-arrange and de-clutter our bathrooms.  The other category of our budget is the only area where we do not share expenses.  For me this included a couple of books that I wanted and some gifts to family members.  Ms. D decided to splurge a bit this month with some nights out with her friends and updating her makeup and hair.

Ms. D chiming in here to say that I went waaay overboard with my spending as evidenced by my ridiculous total of $597!  Most of my "shopping" was spent catching up with friends, some of whom I hadn't seen since graduation last June.  Seeing my grand total and looking at how much it took away from loan payments led to a sad moment where I indulged in a moderate amount of whining and feeling sorry for myself.  After fussing about a self-created problem, I set a future goal to collaborate with my friends on how we can spend more time together while spending less money.  We love food and movies together so one simple fix is to do more at-home girl's nights.  Netflix, Amazon, and Redbox are readily available and would cut the cost of theater tickets.  Work sometimes leaves us with no motivation to cook and in those instances takeout vs. eating out saves us from the temptation to order drinks and saves on a tip (hey, you gotta be cheap when you have student loans!).  Note to self: do better in February!

Overall our total spending was $3,977 which is lower than our December spending of $4,450.    Hopefully we can work on getting this number down to under $3,000 and we both have a few places where we can cut costs to achieve this.

On the passive income side of the house things have been looking up.  I had a blast in December putting together a new crypto mining rig using some of the profits from previous crypto mining.  Investments have also increased leading to more passive income flowing in.  Here is our updated infographic!

And there you have it, the huge increases from crypto mining and stock market strength has increased our passive income to $1542 per month from $604 in November.