Bruno & Co.’s 2017/2018 Spending
We did it folks – another full orbit around the wonderful star at the center of our Solar System! Considering humans haven’t achieved immortality (yet), we only have a limited number of these sweet orbits to experience. Thus, I try to remind myself on a regular basis that life is short and one should carpe diem the shit out of each and every year.
Twenty Eighteen was one hell of a year for us. We traveled to Canada for a month in the winter, traveled to Europe for 3 months in the Spring while Amanda was pregnant, and then successfully added another human to planet Earth in late August. A wild experience!
The year ended with stock markets down about 6%, but for most of the year our total portfolio was floating pretty high around $1,300,000. In this post we’ll break down the super detailed specifics of our expenses for the last two years!
Hello New Human!
Why did we have a kid when the world already has 7.6 billion people – all spewing carbon pollution, accelerating climate change, and ultimately contributing to the Sixth Great Extinction? Well, I guess we thought it would be fun. Does that make us assholes? Maybe!?
Most people don’t want to read about pregnancy, labor, and delivery, so I’ll keep it brief: Holy Shit – Women Are Amazing!
The U.S. healthcare system is in terrible condition – most people know this – but our experience with the ACA (aka Obamacare) has been simply amazing. It is so awesome, we feel guilty using it. We had absolutely wonderful health care service through every part of the pregnancy and total out-of-pocket cost amounted to about $4,300 (plus a few hundred dollars in vitamins and prescriptions):
- Insurance Deductible: $2500
- Annual Insurance Premiums: $1800
With all our medical spending last year, we went crazy with credit card churning and got a ton of points worth the equivalent of around 20% cash back (YES – THIS IS INSANE, if you’re not already into credit card churning, dear God, please check the Credit Card Recommendation Flowchart over at r/churning).
Finally, here is the ridiculous hospital bill during our stay for labor and C-section delivery:
Our 2018 Income and Expenses
High Level Summary for 2018:
Total Spending = $30,627
Total Earned Income = $22,200
Total Net Spending = $8,427
Home Value (per Zillow.com on 12/4/18) = $303,000
Investment Portfolio (on 12/4/18) = $941,705
Gross Spend as a % of Investment Portfolio = $30,627 / $941,705 = 3.3%
Net Spend as a % of Investment Portfolio = $8,427 / $941,705 = 0.9%
Conservatively ignoring the added value of our paid-off house, our Safe Withdrawal Rate for 2018 was 0.9%. A bit of an odd year with the high amount of income we earned, something that we don’t expect to happen every year.
Earned Income Detail
On the income side of things, we made a whopping $22,200 this year. The Internet Retirement Police have long ago revoked our ability to use the word “retired”, so we hang on the Financially Independent side of FI/RE.
Renting out our primary home for four months over the course of the year helps to offset our frequent traveling, something we’ll keep doing in the future. We sunset our short-term Airbnb rental of the basement last Spring in anticipation of a tiny person moving in. The biggest surprise was remote consulting work that Travis did earlier in the year – about 145 hours in total. Small bursts of remote work with a high billing rate is the way to go!
MAJOR INCOME ITEMS
IT Consulting = $13,500
House Rental = $5,170
Airbnb Hosting = $2,520
Credit Card Churning (points turned to cash) = $920
Spending Detail
This is based on the format from our previous post Bruno & Co.’s 2016 Spending. If you’d like to scrutinize the data below in its Google Doc format, please help yourself here!
All praise for the above wonderful spreadsheet should be directed at Amanda! She is amazing with spreadsheets and is truly a delightful data analyst. If anybody has any questions or suggestions on how we can improve spending in some of these categories, please make a comment below!
Happy New Year folks, we hope your 2018 was as fun and eventful as ours!