This month was one of those in life where you look back on it in a couple contradictory ways. While I’m proud of all the accomplishments over the course of July, I never want to live this month again. We had a mountain of work to accomplish between home repairs, home renovations and moving back in. While that was happening we also had the most intense stretch of extended family time we’ve ever encountered. In the midst of all that chaos, I was afraid of what our inaugural FIRE monthly budget in CO would show.
Before we ever came back to the US, my assumption was that the month of our return would be so unpredictable and expensive that we would just have to write it off and call it a loss. I had made peace with that outcome. It’s understandable that reviving a life in the US would throw some curveballs that we couldn’t be ready for.
The reality of the month however, at least financially speaking, was far better than my pessimistic predictions. In the state of FIRE post, I detailed the planning we did for all of the move-back related expenses. We ended up over-planning across nearly every category. In our preparation we set aside more money than we actually needed. Every expense category came in cheaper than planned.
For this post I won’t be revisiting those move-back funds, and I’ll focus strictly on the regular budget month.
Income
Our income is very simple now that we’re back and living on a FIRE budget.
| Investments: 4% withdrawal | $4,511.08 |
This same amount will be used for the next year, and I will adjust it for inflation in July of ’27. Also worth noting is that dividends and interest will not show up as separate line items in our income. That is all considered a part investment production, and they will simply be counted as part of the safe withdrawal amount.
Expenses
Total Expenses: $4,289.24 Withdrawal Rate: 3.8%
| Grocery Store | $927.00 | Actual total here is $1,333.89. We established a $1K grocery replenishment move-back fund where everything over $927 (our projected normal monthly amount) was charged. |
| Uncategorized | $377.75 | We budget $500 for this fund, used for unexpected home and car maintenance and repairs, as well as general unexpected expenses. An example outside of home/auto repairs would be school fees. |
| Discretionary | $500.00 | $722.39 total, $222.39 pulled from discretionary account. We budget $500 per month and put any excess into a savings account. In months like this where we run over, we pull from that discretionary savings account. |
| House Escrow | $450.39 | Sinking Fund: property taxes $3,428.62/yr, insurance $1,976/yr |
| Auto/Umbrella Escrow | $269.96 | Sinking Fund: $2,335/yr auto ins, $455/yr umbrella., $350/yr registration, $99.50/yr AAA roadside |
| Health/Dental Ins. Premium | $253.78 | $165.78 health insurance, $79 dental insurance, $9 vision insurance |
| Water/HOA | $100.00 | We didn’t receive a water bill this month, and this amount was the HOA fee. |
| Clothes | $200.00 | Sinking fund |
| Taxes including Roth Conversion | $134.33 | Sinking fund. $6,012 total taxes, minus $4,400 child tax credit |
| Gifts | $120.00 | Sinking fund |
| Car Replacement | $115.55 | Sinking fund: Allows a 20K inflation adjusted purchase every 10 years. That plus trade-in value will get a decent new car. |
| Natural Gas (Xcel) | $0.00 | No bill in first month |
| Electric (CORE) | $0.00 | No bill in first month |
| Life Insurance | $99.81 | |
| Phone (Google FI) | $92.29 | Three lines with heavy data usage before we got internet access set up in our house. |
| Internet (Xfinity) | $60.00 | |
| Gym Fund | $54.16 | Sinking fund. Peloton + Rec Center |
| Giving | $55.83 | Sponsor child and other donations |
| Gas | $144.64 | A ton of driving with JC’s family in town and a trip to see my mom. Three full tanks of gas. |
| SimpliSafe | $32.99 | |
| Amazon Prime | $12.17 | Sinking fund |
| Cloud Storage | $2.99 | For pictures and documents |
| Storage | $246.00 | Final month of Public Storage |
| Virtual Mailbox | $39.60 | Had to ship a bunch of mail pieces to our house, so this was much more than normal. |
Analysis
A 3.8% withdrawal rate is a great result. I’m almost blown away that it was possible in this crazy month. Although we did have a couple things working in our favor.
We saved money on utilities unexpectedly. I thought we would have received a bill at the end of the month for our usage during July, but it didn’t work like that. We didn’t have a water, gas, or electric bill. That saved us something like $500. We came in under budget by $221.83, and with those bills we would have been in the red by $278.17, and our withdrawal rate would have climbed to 4.25%.
There were also some categories working against us this month. Our gas usage was absurd, nearly $100 more than typical. We still had to pay the final month of our storage unit at $246. Remove those and we would be back under 4% even with utilities.
Considering a couple months ago we weren’t even sure we had achieved FIRE, this feels like a budget result worth celebrating. It will only be as time goes by and we get more months recorded that we can see averages and trends. For now though, all we can do is start with the first month, and I’ll take the result.
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