Upper bounds on monthly spending

I spent a lot of time last month on Mint. Mint.com, for the uninitiated, is a personal finance aggregator of sorts. It automatically pulls data from all your financial accounts and gives you a command-and-control view for situational awareness over your finances. I highly recommend it. Though it's not the be-all-and-end-all of personal finance, I'm happy enough with it that I've never thought to look for alternatives. And yes, at first I was leery of the security implications of having all my bank account information (and passwords) in one place. I'm not anymore and you shouldn't be either.

Mr. Money Mustache planted the seed in my brain to spend less, cut expenses! Every day I found myself on Mint, agonizing over my purchases. Silently cursing myself for going out to lunch at work twice at the beginning of November. "No more!" I resolved, no more blowing money for lunch. In October I was lax with my finances and I let a credit card bill slip for two days. I saw the late charge on Mint, called Bank of America and got them to refund the fee. I'm not worried anymore about forgetting to make payments. For one, Mint has friendly automatic reminders, and secondly I'm way too interested in my finances now. Mint makes real life like playing a video game, and I'm hooked.

I'm going to give you the general trend of my monthly spending, but first a word about the way my girlfriend and I do our finances, because otherwise the numbers will have no context. We adhere to the Yours/Mine/Ours strategy of joint finances. She has her personal bank accounts, and I have mine. Then we have joint checking and savings accounts for expenses and joint purchases, like furniture and groceries. Our paychecks are split and direct deposited into the joint account as well as our own accounts. This was the arrangement we settled upon when we first moved in together in our last apartment and it's been working pretty well so far. So all my Mint numbers are for my accounts and the joint accounts — good enough for our purposes.

Here's some numbers. I'm starting in June since that's after we bought our house and the numbers got relatively "normal":

• June - $7,981
• July - $9,085
• August - $6,682
• September - $9,375
• October - $8,841
• November - $4,545

These are some high spending numbers, I'm not going to deny it. November was the first month after I converted to Mustachianism, and you can see the difference. Now there's a few caveats, we did have some big payments we needed to make that are skewing the numbers. June was car insurance for the year ($870), July was a bunch of car repairs and maintenance work ($1500) and earrings for my girlfriend's birthday (not telling), September was getting the house exterior painted ($2400), and October was a storm door and a bunch of handiwork around the house ($1100). That said, the vast majority of the expenses were little things, various assorted shopping, buying groceries multiple times per week, etc etc.

So I'm hopeful. Here we can see a massive improvement from a previously cavalier financial situation. All I really did was scrutinize every purchase, stop buying lunch, and set a budget and weekly plan for grocery shopping. And I'm sure I can do even better, but damn, I can't believe I was spending so much money.