It’s back!!! Welcome to Racket’s Money Journal series, where you can snoop on the finances of an anonymous Twin Cities neighbor. Interested in submitting your own? Email jay@racketmn.com for instructions on over-sharing the monetary details of your life! (And gang? Let’s keep the very popular series going following a long period of dormancy.) H/T to Refinery29 for pioneering a tremendous concept that we’re excited to localize.
Job: Software tester
Age: 32
Neighborhood: Second-ring suburb
Education: Bachelor’s degree
Salary: $104K
Partner’s salary: $94K
Dependents: Two dogs (total freeloaders)
Estimated net worth: ~$370K if you count the house value in there
Note: All of our income goes to the same joint account and is used for paying for everything.
Credit cards: $0, we pay off the cards in full each month for the sweet, sweet credit card rewards.
Vehicle: $0, paid off the car in 2016; we both work remotely so no need for a second car.
Divorce agreement: If we got divorced our agreement is I get the first dog and my partner gets the second and we’d split the money down the middle.
Mortgage: $216K remaining, but with that clutch 2021 sub 3.5% interest rate so we aren’t rushing to pay it down ASAP.
Retirement accounts: $65K in my IRA, $54K in work retirement account, $11K in an HSA (partner has their own accounts).
Non-retirement cash (spend and savings accounts): $44K ($17K emergency fund at 3.5% interest rate, $17K house fix up money for upcoming bathroom remodel/AC work at 3.5% interest rate, rest in checking for some medical expenses coming up).
Miscellaneous things: House, car, lots of art, some instruments.
Paycheck amount: $2,717.95 twice a month after everything is taken out; twice a year I get three paycheck months and the third paycheck splits evenly between savings, date money, and fun money.
Rent: $1,738 mortgage + $262 additional payment to make it a nice round $2,000.
Utilities:
- Electric: $130 average (I like the temp to start with a 6)
- Gas, water, trash/recycling, sewer: $65 average
- Phone: $38 (Straight Talk)
- Internet: $75 (fiber)
Insurances:
- Health: $23.62 (cost for adding partner, work pays my premium 100%)
- Dental: $1.46 (cost for adding partner, work pays my premium 100%)
- Disability: $0; work pays full amount
- Car, renters, life bundled total: $150
Retirement: 6% taken out pre-tax for my 401K (work matches 6%) + additional $500/month into IRA.
Gas: $150 budgeted, usually never use it all but then we have money saved up for big road trips.
Groceries: $600 for the two of us + weekly group dinner for the game night we host.
Subscriptions:
Content/lifestyle subscriptions: Amex Platinum CC ($695/year; I keep track and it actually does break even), Google Domains ($12/year), 1Pass ($60/year), MN Horticultural Society ($65/year), Patreon ($55), Sahan Journal ($5.42), Rolling Stone ($7.99), Racket ($5) (editor’s note: hell yeah), Letterloop ($5.43)
Donation monthly subscriptions: ACLU ($5), Friends of the Boundary Waters ($26), Conservation Fund ($20), NAACP ($25), Hennepin County Library ($50), Minnesota Off Road Cyclists ($21.88), Cuyuna MTB Association ($20), FoodNotBombs ($50), Sanctuary Supply Depot ($22)
Did your family talk about money growing up?
Not a ton—sometimes we’d be told “No, that’s expensive,” but otherwise we didn’t really talk about it too much as a full family that I remember. The only piece of financial advice I really remember from my parents is my dad saying to make sure each person in the relationship has their own private personal spending that the other person doesn’t get to touch because he was bitter about having to use his fun money on tight months to pay bills.
I honestly credit one of my brothers for really helping me understand finances. He made some bad decisions with college loans but he took the time after that to make sure that—as the baby of the family—I understood what he did wrong and what choices to not make. He really made sure I set myself up well and that I had a healthy understanding of finances, credit, and student loans and is why I got my associate degree fully completed while in high school.
For all the kids out there, PSEO is the way to go! Get your Associates for free! Community college is cheap if you have to pay for classes and a credit is a credit!
Did you worry about money growing up?
I did mostly because I had untreated anxiety till college, not because my family had unstable housing or food situations. We always had money for books and doing our hobbies and field trips but we didn’t really go out to eat much or stay on top of trends. Our vacations would be driving to visit family and staying with them or visiting state parks in cabins—we never did the Dells/Disney/etc. I think in my head I just saw the frugality (and sometimes cheapness) of my parents and took it to mean “one wrong move and we’ll be unable to afford anything” and then ran with that mentality without ever confirming it with anyone.
At what age did you become financially independent?
I would say 24 to be basically independent—prior to then even when I was paying my own bills and living in my own place I knew I could fall back if needed. My brother once cosigned my car loan for me and put down a deposit for me since I wasn’t liquid enough, I went back on my parent’s insurance when I went to try working at a startup, large apartment purchases ended up not having to happen since my parents just so happened to need a new item so we got their old one. Around 24 is when my partner and I were starting to have stable employment (we made like $80K as a household and felt invincible) and didn’t feel the need to check the budget before grocery shopping, and when we started feeling comfortable to start recurring donations.
How did you learn how to budget your life?
Since I’ve always been money anxious, once I found out about YNAB (You Need A Budget) while in college I was hooked. The idea of “every dollar has a job” really stuck with me. The first few months was just writing down every time I spent any money and figuring out how I wanted to define those purchases into categories, another few months of seeing my average spend in those categories and tweaking them, and then the past nine years has been detailing every expense in there and tracking it. I can tell you exactly how much I spent at Taco Bell in 2020 or how much drinks at a specific concert in 2017 cost—it’s all in there, and takes at most about an hour a month to keep up. I bought the software for my partner too when we started dating because I needed someone on the same page as me, and we’ve evolved how we split money over the course of our relationship from dating to marriage. We also make sure each of us has the same amount of fun money budgeted every month as well even though we’ve always made (sometimes drastically) different amounts—it just felt more fair to us.
It honestly makes life so much easier for me, anxiety-wise. Even though I have way too much in our checking account right now (it’s my emotional support dragon hoard), I can tell you what every single dollar is going to be used for. If I get anxious about buying new tires I can open the budget and see that it’s fine because I have $625.93 saved up and earmarked specifically for car repairs and it won’t affect the timeline for remodeling the hidden mold bathroom because that’s an entirely separate earmarked pile of money and both of those won’t affect my travel plans since that’s a completely separate pile. I also like the fact that even when we have super expensive times (like the current week I’m going through…) I don’t need to sit and move money between accounts to pay off my CC; I can just pay and not even think twice that my checking account will cover it—that mental load being off is worth losing out on some gains to me.
We also try very consciously to not lifestyle creep as much as our salary would allow, and budgeting helps that by speaking for the money so we aren’t like “tee-hee let’s buy first-class plane tickets since the pile of money is big” instead of just zoning out in the basic economy seat like a normal person. We still definitely indulge a lot, but it’s more on the scale of getting fancy ingredients and hosting friends for meals and buying from internet artists and doing some vacations that aren’t entirely on credit card rewards vs. like resorts and eating out a ton.
Have you ever received inherited income, major financial gifts, or large insurance payouts?
My parents co-signed on my student loans (got me a 2.3% rate—it was variable based on LIBOR so had to pay it off quickly before it spiked but it saved me so much money) and we got about $10K from our parents combined to help pay for a wedding. My brother also gave me $1K as a wedding gift for getting to roast my partner in a speech at the wedding and it was a worthwhile trade. I also received a few various $500 scholarships over my schooling.
My parents also gave me my first car (grandma’s old car when she couldn’t drive) right when I turned 16, let me trade it back to my dad years later for his Jetta that he was getting rid of, and then my brother cosigned and put money down on my third and current car when the Jetta was dying. My family is also big on “trickle-down Christmas” which is when you buy something new for yourself you give the older one to someone else in the family for free, so as the baby I’ve received a lot over the years (couches, computers, video game consoles, mattresses).
The biggest financial gift though is that I did have the peace of mind that if there was an emergency I had a soft place to land, so I could take bigger risks than someone who didn’t have that. Jumping to the startup from the stable job I was at really rocketed all the skills that let me more than double my income from that stable job, but I could only do it because I was able to be on my parent’s insurance and knew that if it didn’t work out I could borrow from them for a few months. Easier to risk losing tomorrow’s grocery budget if you know someone would take you out to eat anyways.
Do you worry about money now?
I worry because I have a chronic + progressive disability which means I can’t count on being able to work until retirement age. We’re trying to maximize savings and income so that when I inevitably go down to part time/not working we won’t have to worry about losing the house or not being able to buy groceries. Since we’re lucky to both work in tech currently we try to keep expenses where one person’s income can cover monthly expenses (bills, groceries, pet stuff, some fun money, some donations) and the other person’s income goes fully to savings/home repairs/fun money so if one of us gets laid off we don’t need to change our day to day lifestyle. We also have a six-month emergency fund that would cover if both of us ended up getting let go at the same time which lets us not have to fret as much about the tech industry layoffs on the horizon. (If your company is hiring drop a link in the comments!)
How much do you think a person or household needs to earn to live comfortably in the Twin Cities?
To me comfort is being able to grocery shop and not have to read all the labels and keeping the house at the temp you want and not having to check your bank account before agreeing to meet friends for a bite to eat and being able to have little treats often. For a two-person household living in the ‘burbs 100K feels comfortable; I haven’t had to think in terms of a single person and budget for over a decade so I won’t even guess on that.
Day 1
8:46 p.m.: $205.01 on a wedding gift for a friend.
9:08 p.m.: $151.91 on a third air purifier and smoke specific filter to cover more of the house with all this bad AQI.
Day 2
10:13 p.m.: $2,790.63 for some much-needed central air work that we had priced out last week; they found more we need to do but that’s a next week expense you won’t get to see.
Day 3
10:16 a.m.: $10 for monthly medications—thanks insurance!
Day 4
11:10 a.m.: $100 for someone to pick up a truckload of trash and bring it to the dump for us.
8:06 p.m.: $13.65 dinner for two from Taco Bell with the Cravings Boxes from the app (full cost covered by gift card we got from work).
Day 5
7:01 p.m.: $50.78 for UberEats for myself and the dogsitter ($15 of it reimbursed by the monthly credit card benefits).
Day 6
10:25 a.m.: $46 for Lyft to the airport.
10:59 a.m.: $0 for lounge food and drinks (abusing the CC benefits to make the fee worth it).
3:54 p.m.: $0 for layover lounge food and drinks.
Day 7
9:45 a.m.: €30 for new sim card with data for the trip.
9:54 a.m.: €116.90 for a 10 train ride pass + airport supplement.
1:21 p.m.: €10.99 for lunch from a fry shop.
7:26 p.m.: €9.99 for dinner from a kebab shop.