10 Overlooked Expenses That Will Wreck Your Budget

many people struggle with their monthly budget simply because they' forgotten to add these expenses when you set up your budget for the first time it's easy to remember things like rent or your mortgage payment utilities food very important thing to remember but there are some things that come up periodically that you might forget to add to your budget what are these silent budget killers and what can you do to remediate the situation so that they don't come up unexpectedly and find you searching for cash that's what we're going to talk about in this video and be sure you pay attention to number 10 but before we even start I'll mention that we have struggled with every single one of these areas they've caught us uh in an unguarded State at different times so this hopefully will be some help toward getting your budget in tow if you don't know us I'm hope and I'm Larry this is under the median where every week talk about practical frugality believe it or not when we set up our budget 36 years ago one of the things that we forgot to add was Christmas and holiday expenses the thing with Christmas is most people when they consider Christmas as part of their budget they only include one thing Christmas gifts but your Christmas budget is a whole lot more than just those gifts that you're going to put under the tree for your friends and family every year let's take an example if you travel for Christmas and you have out of town guests that you want to go see or family members then you have to consider the traveling expenses if you decorate for Christmas you have Decor expenses especially if you're having them over to your house and you're having the main meal and hosting dinners is one of those things that will catch you off guard if you're not careful and this of course is not just for Christmas but it's for every other holiday throughout the year we just hosted an Easter dinner for a ton of our friends and family members I'm going to give you example of a carefully budgeted Easter dinner now all the things on this Easter dinner I took advantage of sales at this time of the year asparagus for instance was 88 cents per pound the potatoes the r of potatoes I had a coupon so I got 8 lounds for $1.88 how much did all of this cost us I did a cost evaluation sheet for you showed you that for a dinner for ton people for Easter it came and just under $20 now the good thing about this is as always I overcooked guys so I am not touching the stove or any other apparatus except maybe my microwave to heat up some things for about the next 3 days and the other thing that we did too we incorporated other items in the meal because other people brought items over for desserts and different things that added to it so we weren't the only ones making the food list so anything on our food budget that had a zero beside it that's because those were items that are grown children and their spouses or significant others brought with them when they came to the dinner if these ideas are inspiring you to be more frugal make sure you hit the like button we'd love to have you a part of our Frugal family and if cutting those expenses every single month particularly the ones you're already aware of if that's one of your sticking points when it comes to sticking to a budget we have some help for you I wrote a free ebook called 10 ways to radically reduce your expenses I list the top 10 ways that we cut back our monthly expenses so we could save more money when we were saving for great big goals and doing it on a low income I'll make sure that there is a link to that resource in the description of this video gifts can really come up and sneak up on your budget there's a lot of different gifts that we have to give or that we desire to give that can be not a part of our budget we don't even think about them maybe somebody got an advancement at work and they're having a party for them and they're giving them gifts uh a promotional party uh there's just all kinds of little hidden gifts sometimes it's really hard to account for them but we need to make sure that our budget reflects those spendable items we all seem to be aware of things like family birthdays right so that's usually sort of on our radar there are other things though like weddings that will be coming up wedding showers baby showers you never know when somebody's going to pop the question and they're going to say yes and you never know when somebody's going to say guess what we're expecting those things come up very unexpectedly you have to leave a little bit of room in your gift budget to take care of those sorts of things when they come up here's something else that comes up seemingly every year and this does get us every year around the last of May the 1 of June graduations you have a friend or family member who is graduating from grade school high school or even college and you're invited to a great celebration in honor of them you want to make sure that you're able to take something along in order to congratulate them for this milestone in their life here's just a couple of really quick ideas for how you can take care of these unexpected celebrations without busting your budget one of the ways you can do it is by seeing if there is some sort of a group gift this is particularly something that happens I would say in bridal showers or in showers for expectant mothers and fathers usually there's a larger item and a whole bunch of people are going in on that larger item you find out who is in charge of collecting the money for that item and you simply give them the amount that you're donating toward that item now the person who gives the gift never puts down this gift is from these families and here's what each family gave toward this gift that does not happen what does happen is that there is a card which is given that says this gift is given on behalf of the following families and your family will be listed amongst that list one of the things that you can give away that often times we don't think about is to give away an experience for instance an expected mother might really appreciate some meals that you can make for her or maybe babysit her children while she's taking care of the newborn there's all kinds of different things that you can do that won't cost you a lot of money but will be very meaningful to that person final idea in the gift category before we move on to the next area of your budget that you might be forgetting and that is give something homemade this these baskets are made by my future daughter-in-law Delaney she will be our daughter-in-law in five days guys we are so unbelievably excited I had her make three of these these baskets are gifts for the ladies who are helping me with the rehearsal dinner on the evening before the wedding celebration guys she makes these out of recycled plastic bags they're AB absolutely beautiful they're useful they're you can wipe them up with a with a damp cloth and they last a really long time uh I'm going to make sure guys she sells these in her Etsy Shop they're really really cute she's got some great stuff in there I'll leave a link to her Etsy shop in the description of the video but just an idea handmade gifts social events can kind of creep up on us from out of nowhere and cause us to spend extra money that we weren't planning on there's so many different things that can happen maybe a group of friends want to go out to eat or there's something special going on somewhere else it's going to cost you a little bit of money to get in maybe there's some snacks or some things you want to buy because it has to do with a donation toward that group so there's all kinds of little things like that that can sneak up on us yeah and you mentioned donations I do think that is something that sneaks up on us when somebody especially if they're collecting money or collecting supplies for something that is an amazing opportunity to give into the lives of others you want to be a part of it so planning ahead for those opportunities is super important one of the things that Larry and I did now uh many of you know that we are Christians so 10% of our money right off the top goes to our tithe but in addition to that for years we have had what we called our giving budget and that's money which is allocated for something that just really tugs at our heartstrings and we think I want to be a part of that so we already have money set as side at the beginning of the year it's a sinking fund which means it starts with the whole amount and throughout the year we spend it down until it reaches zero now if you're unfamiliar with syncing funds this is a great way to fund some of these things that may be unexpected in your budget we did a whole video on syncing funds and how to save for them and exactly what they are we're going to make sure that that video guys is linked up above and also in the description of this video and I can't tell you how much joy that it's given hope and I to be able to help other people when there's been a need an emergency need perhaps in a family that's needed some help at the time we already had a sinking fund going we had money there allocated we just gave it to that family and it was such a blessing and to be very clear when we were raising all four boys on a less than average income this was not a whole lot of money and sometimes it was things we could do like take them a meal or mow their lawn or rake their leaves or shovel their snow yeah we live in the midwest these were things that we could do that were acts of service that maybe didn't necessarily cost us any money or a lot of money but we do think really really strongly that having a part of your budget to give to others whether you are living below average or above average that is super super important and of course throughout time foral does work guys and you will save small amounts of money over time which lead to large amounts of money and now it's it's really nice because our giving budget has been able to enlarge as our fality has grown and our bank account has grown Insurance renewals can come kind of out of the corner and catch us unguarded even though we should be able to expect them our car insurance our home insurance uh any insurance that you have at all we have to pay that every year you might as well have a category in your budget for insurance renewals well this particular happens for those of us who don't pay our insurance premiums every single month if you are basing your beginning Budget on your bank account statements over the last month or even last two months sometimes you might miss this especially if that insurance renewal happens every 3 months or every 6 months or once a year now a caveat for dealing with this is to make sure that you are looking through the past several months of expenses in your bank account not just the last one or two months I think that you can base sort of a basic Budget on this but then you want to go back through and just scour really quickly and say is there something in here that I have missed that's going to come back up again and I'm going to need to renew it and by the way if you pay those insurance premiums once a year instead of every month a lot of times you can save some quick cash we did it and we saved 8% on each of our policies and the way we've dealt with this in the past Rec ly is to set up a sinking fund for those so that they're they come right off the top really they're already accounted for for that year here's another one that has taken us unawares and that's memberships subscriptions and online services you know what happens online it's is this new sort of era of click the big red buy button go to PayPal if you can and then PayPal automatically sets it up or even if you're using a debit card or a credit card they're going to go this is a renewal it's going to happen every days or once a year and you're going to automatically unless you call them and say stop don't renew it and we forget those things really really easily one of the ways to account for this is to just simply have a list just an ongoing list what am I paying for what subscriptions do I have and how often are they Auto renewing once you have that list then that makes it much easier to account for it in your monthly budget now if they're taking out that renewal every 3 months you're going to take that whole amount divide it by three and every single month you're going to set aside that specific amount so that when they renew it in 3 months you already have that monthly money set aside for it home maintenance is another area that can be a little sneaky there are regular expenses that we have to pay we have to change our furnace filters out every few months you have to you know and that's all year around that's CU you have the air conditioning on you have the heater on uh there's just so many things uh involved with keeping a home up that you want to make sure that you're covering those you have to mow the lawn you have to have gas money to put in the lawn mower you have to do some maintenance to your lawnmower uh every aspect of home ownership costs some money and you need to do an evaluation and then set up a budget for those items there are some items that just don't occur as regularly twice a year especially if you live in the midwest guys your hvat guy is going to come over and in the spring he's going to check your central air and make sure that's set up and ready to go for the season and in the fall he's going to come and he's going to check and make sure that furnace is going to kick on and not fail you the first night that it goes below freezing because it's going to be unfortunate if if you push that button to turn it on and nothing happens that's that's one of the things that we have built into our yearly home maintenance budget one way to deal with this guys is to once again very much like some of the other tips we've given you for make a list of of the gifts that you give every single year then leave a little bit of extra we just told you make a list of your reoccurring subscriptions and make sure you have money set aside for that same thing with Home Maintenance you're going to make a list of all the regular Home Maintenance that must be done every single season usually we think of Home Maintenance in terms of seasonally because here in the Midwest like every 12 weeks it's it's time for a new season and so for us it's like quarterly we look at that quarterly and say what do we do to get ready for spring what do we do to get ready for fall what do we do to get ready for winter and those are like things that are they're on auto repeat for us but each one of those things that we do to get ready for a new season has some costs associated with it so what are those costs for you what are those tasks that you do every quarter and how much are they costing you once you have that list that gives you a super duper good sort of Benchmark as to how much you should have in that yearly Home Maintenance fund and then once again you're going to add a little extra guys because stuff happens all of a sudden there's a puddle of water in front of your water heater it's happened to us all of a sudden you flip that furnace on and it stops working and it's the coldest night of the year yes that happened to us too all these things we tell you do it's because it's happened to us make sure that you have some in that now one of the things I'd like to address super quickly is the fact that many people take that extra Home Maintenance the oopsie didn't expect that to happen they take it out of their 3 to six month emergency fund if you have a fully funded emergency fund of 3 to 6 months you can take those unexpected moments out of that fund if you wish but if you have a little bit of extra give in your budget we think it's a super good idea to put that money aside we live in an era now where home office supplies are very important it used to be that all we needed maybe was some notebook paper and a pen and a pencil but now most of us have a computer and we have a printer and the printer requires a toner ink cartridge it requires paper and it might even require some replacement after you've had it a few years so there are some additional expenses that we have as far as our home office maintenance goes those need to be figured into to your annual budget so they don't sneak up on you and all of a sudden your printers run out of ink and you got to go and buy a a $60 toner cartridge for it and you don't have it in your budget here's how you deal with this situation we're the first to admit it is hard to find deals on toner and ink especially if you're going to some place like Office Depot often times when it comes to sales they exclude those items but what you can do if you have a store loyalty card for Office Depot then you can acrw money on that account and then use it now you need to be very careful because that money does expire we did this one time we bought something and there was 100% rebate on it and so we bought the maximum put that rebate on our store loyalty card and we knew we had within 30 days we had to spend that money so we waited until we had enough in there to almost pay for an entire cartridge I think maybe it was even two cartridges yes we bought cartridges Biggy and we paid like 10 bucks for two ink cartridges for the printer so think of workarounds and every once in a while they don't exclude those items and you can make sure that you get a little bit of a discount on it in fact I remember now you guys I remember not only did we use all of our money we had acred in that store loyalty card but they actually did have a deal on printer ink and it was like you spend a certain amount you get $10 off so we made sure that we spent that amount which was two ink cartridges we got that $10 off plus we were able to layer on all the money we' accured in the store loyalty card if you have younger kids no doubt they're in school and there's a lot of costs involved with education and there's a lot of things that I really honestly say it sneaks up on you uh a teacher might require their whole class to read a book that they don't have in their library and they have to go out and they have to buy the book maybe they can buy it used on the used Market but still there's an expense for that our Cooperative that we belong belong to reads about what five to eight books a year and we've had to go and buy those books right at the very beginning so we had to figure that amount of money in and there's so many other little hidden expenses when it comes to education additional classes like band yeah or choir or even CrossCountry team things like that schools are beginning to offload some of those expenses on to parents so if you want to sign your child up for those courses it's going to cost you an extra amount of money so it's not just walking in and paying for the fees for the year for the fees and for the books it's a whole lot of extra expenses and let me tell you I walked into Office Depot and looked at a long list of supplies that each student was supposed to bring to class and I thought I was going to I don't even have like grade school age children anymore and I thought I was going to have a coronary right there in the store one of the things you want to do is you want to make sure that you are watching for back to school deals on those specific items I want to know from you guys who have children who are still in grade school or even in high school what are you doing about these back to school expenses how are you affording this long list of supplies that teachers need and believe me my kudos to teachers because they are underpaid and underappreciated and believe me they are underfunded so they are not asking for these supplies simply for fun you know why they're asking for these supplies so that the cost of those supplies doesn't come out of their personal pocketbook so I get it but I would love to know how are you dealing with it and keeping it within a reasonable budget there are so many things involved with this there's calculators you'd have to buy there's lunches there's field trips and if they're in the band you might have to buy a musical instrument unless this the school supplies that instrument most of the time you'll have to have your own cost of lunches have your child pack a lunch from home guys much much less expensive the cost of field trips make sure that you are asking whichever club or whichever teacher is sponsoring that field trip as a parent I always ask tell me all of the expenses inclusive yeah because some people are not as budget-minded as you and I are and they'll say well it's you know it's $25 for them to get into the play and they neglect to tell you as a parent that you're going to have to pay a transportation fee that they're going to have to either bring a lunch or buy a lunch that you're going to they're going to a specific restaurant it's going to cost you for that restaurant meal I always am very very specific with what I am asking before I tell that child yes you can go or I'm sorry we're going to have to pass on this opportunity the other thing to take into consideration is periodic fundraisers Y and this is this is one of my pet peeves I feel like and remember our our son is going to be a senior next year and he is homeschooled but we're involved in a large homeschool Co-op that has a lot of the same opportunities available as he would have in a public school setting so he definitely he's involved in the extracurriculars he's involved in mcals he's involved in a vocal Jazz Ensemble in the place and all of those cost additional fees not only that you get into it and you have the people who are in charge of this who say all of a sudden oh you need to bring a snack for 30 Street oh by the way and then they tell you what their idea of a snack is I'm like well that's too back cuz that's not Mya of a snack um they tell you that there's a fundraiser your child needs to be there your child needs to take part in the fundraiser there are a lot of little handouts and oh how about a little more how about a little more how about a little more once again before your child enrolls ask about ask all the questions you need to I am not opposed clearly we're not opposed because our sons have been involved in a lot of extracurricular activities and we have paid for them but we really tried really hard to know ahead of time what exactly is this going to cost us once we knew the total cost it didn't bother us as much because we already budgeted for it yep car maintenance is another area in your budget that you'll need to have money for now if you have an older car you'll need to allow more money for them because they're going to cost more money to keep going even if you have a newer car you've still got registration fees you have oil changes it even costs to fill your tires with air and the other thing that can cost a lot of a little bit of money throughout the year is if you have your car washed at a car wash place or even a place that you was it but you have to pay to use their facility that's going to cost those are all little amounts that add up and it's those little amounts that can get us from time to time so it's very important to really assess how much is that car going to cost me to maintain for the year that you're budgeting for it and make a list of those expenses do you all sense a reoccurring theme here a lot of lists involved in this video but boy do they help center you and get your head in the game as to exactly what this is really going to cost you registration fees oil changes registration fees in Illinois are upwards of $200 but I know in other states they are a whole lot more and those of you in Cali man you have got to pass that annual smog check right so you got to make sure that your car is up to Snuff when it comes to all the current standards that also costs you there are various costs in various state so you have to make a list and run through exactly what it's going to cost you to maintain that car and also to repair that car and once again a lot of people take their car repairs out of their emergency fund if you have a three to six month fully funded emergency fund you can certainly take repairs unexpected repairs out of that fund if if you want to here's that big number 10 it will take you by surprise medical and health care costs and hope and I have really hit this one this year one of the things that we're having to pay extra for because of our little injuries is physical therapy and every time we go in we have to pay a certain amount that the insurance does not cover toward that so we have to budget a little more money in this category unless you have really and I do mean really Premium Insurance you are going to pay a deductible and also a co-pay we have pretty good insurance when it comes to insurance insurance is our number one budget category It Is by and far we pay more every single month for in various kinds of insurance than we do any other single budget category it comprises upwards of 50% of our regular income just to pay for insurance across the board all Insurance home insurance car insurance health insurance all of those insurances one of the things that you can do is shop around if your employer provides insurance coverage this is not as easy to do but if you are independently seeking Insurance you certainly can can look around once a year and see what is available on the Open Marketplace for insurance policies you need to balance those co-pays and that deductible with the monthly policy premium amounts the other thing to do is not be afraid to call your insurance company with questions ahead of time before something happens say help me to understand my coverage we knew that with the physical therapy we're paying out of pocket for that physical therapy until we reach $1,250 once we do that we have to pay 20% of the cost and they pick up 80% of the cost 6 months is a long time to be in physical therapy guys and we know that we can sit down and we can figure out about what it's going to cost us for me to be able to continue this therapy for six months 177% of the businesses in the United States of America have really Premium Insurance offered that you don't have those co-pays and deductibles but that means the vast majority of all the rest of us are paying the co-pays and the deductibles you need to make sure that you have figured that into your monthly budget as well as the premiums that you're paying and you need to make sure that you ask for itemized bills before you pay a bill make sure you know what you are paying for and call your insurance company ask all the questions you need to know answers to it's all about figuring your expenses and how to save money now if your budget is really tight and we've had a very tight budget In Our Lifetime there are some certain things that you can do in order to save money and we have a video on it right over there

Channel: Under the Median

Views: 31,647

Keywords: frugality, frugal living, frugal living hacks, frugal living tips, frugal habits, under the median, money saving hacks, how to save money in home budget, frugal lifestyle, growing my savings, budgeting, how to cut housing expenses and save money, how to cut expenses and save money, how to save money faster, how to save more money each month, money saving tips, how to save money, frugal tips, frugal friend, cost-cutting strategies, money-saving hacks, cutting expenses

Id: iWyAkxEmxyk

Length: 28min 9sec (1689 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2024