What I Spend In A Week In Philadelphia As A 21 Year Old

so there's been this trend going around recently where people show how much money they spent in the past weekend because this channel is primarily focused on personal finance and because I want to tap into the YouTube algorithm I thought what better than to make a video about exactly how much money I spent in the past seven days now I'm not sure why this is the case but I don't know anybody in the city of Philadelphia who has a YouTube channel and so I wanted to show you kind of from my perspective how much I pay for rent for everything else for food and kind of break it down for you so that if you're interested in Philadelphia if you're looking towards visiting or anything else in between then this might be of some value I just thought I would bring my own two cents of the table here so we're going to go over some of my fixed weekly costs and some of the variable cause that come up in the past seven days so first of all let's talk about the the big ones here like my rent so for this apartment right here I pay nine hundred and forty eight dollars per month and this is in essentially Center City which is going to be the most expensive part of the city but for nine hundred forty-eight dollars per month I find this to actually be a very good deal and for anybody who lives in the Northeast in major cities like in New York or Washington DC or Boston they know that nine hundred forty eight dollars for an apartment in the center city is a pretty good deal and I find that Philadelphia rents are generally pretty cheap a hell of a lot cheaper than Los Angeles or San Francisco or a lot of other major cities and that $948 includes my electricity includes water includes sewage it could includes everything within that price so the I find it to be a pretty good deal comes out to about two hundred and twenty three dollars a week for my rent now I also have two phone bills that comes out to eighty four dollars per month which is about twenty dollars per week if you divide about 4.25 from the month to get twenty dollars per week now I have two phones I'm not a drug dealer but I like to have fast internet as well so I pay $30 a month for my Wi-Fi and then I also pay three hundred and seventy nine dollars for all of my different types of insurance for health insurance dental everything else in between which comes out to about eighty nine dollars per week for insurance and then I also pay sixty a month for a rock gym which is not something you can do everywhere so you kind of have to pay for it unless you live in Colorado so that's 14 dollars a week so in total my fixed cost to come out to about 350 $3.00 per week now this is not including food this is not including anything else and you may have noticed that I cut out transportation here as a fixed cost because I don't have a car as you might already know and I don't really need one because the city it's pretty very similar to New York in the sense that it's very congested but also very dense and you can walk to pretty much anywhere that you need to go any store any place in the city is an easy walk or maybe a subway ride away so by not having those transportation costs it really does free up a lot of cash in my budget to spend on other things but let's talk about this weekend exactly what I spent so starting with Monday really on that day I didn't spend too much this is what I like to do where Monday's I like to do all of my kind of chores you think of so doing laundry going grocery shopping doing all that I like to do it on Mondays and I do this because they think a lot of people do it on Sunday or on Saturday during the weekend because they have time off then but I don't like bumping into everybody in the store or when I'm doing laundry down in the basement here so I just do it all on Monday so a dollar 25 for laundry I don't use dryers I just use this little clothing rack thing here and sure it does save me like a dollar every time but it's more so just kind of saves energy and I don't want to shrink my clothes so I just don't use dryers and then later on in the day I went grocery shopping the problem with where I live is that I can't really walk to Aldi or to Walmart or any other like really inexpensive food place so I end up with the options of Trader Joe's or Whole Foods and you know I I end up going to Trader Joe's so I spent 33 dollars for all of my food for this week which tends to be kind of less than what I normally spend on food so generally for a week's worth of food I might spend maybe $50 for groceries is kind of what I try to aim for sometimes I'll go over this week it was a lot less because I'm gonna clean out my fridge and clean out some of my my cabinets I need some of the food that I've just been piling up for the past a month or two now I don't really like going to Whole Foods too much because you walk out of Whole Foods with like one bag of groceries and you're looking at like $120 somehow I don't know why I feel like it's just double the price for not that much more value from what I see so I like Trader Joe's but then that's really all I spent for that day on Tuesday I didn't spend very much as well I really just spent two dollars and fifty cents for the subway in Philadelphia which is only moderately sketchy only if you really go at night and then two dollars and 50 cents for the way back I went to the rock gym so that was up in Fishtown so that took a little bit of a hike to get there so five dollars was my total expenses for Tuesday and then on Wednesday I went to Chipotle for lunch so you know this you know I don't mind going out to eat from time to time I don't mind going and getting some food places I don't have to cook at home every single time three or four times a day so for Chipotle it was $9.19 I don't really see a problem with this especially because generally when I go out to eat somewhere I like to get the most bang for my buck I don't know why this is I just always done this but to pull a for example for nine dollars and 18 cents I got like 1200 calories so I thought it was a pretty good deal the one thing I don't like doing is going out to say fancy restaurants I've been to like a couple in my life where maybe it's like $60 for a meal and then it comes out and it's like this one little tiny piece of fish or like a little tiny crab leg and by the time we're done eating it you're more hungry than when you started eating it like that's how small the portions are I don't know and then you end up spending like 60 or 70 dollars I just don't like eating fancy food I just don't see the value in it maybe that's me I'm not talking about healthy food there's a difference paying more money for healthy food but for fancy food I just don't really see the point I don't know I really don't see the difference between a $30 steak and a $300 steak I would just go for the $30 one if I was gonna spend some money so then on Thursday my sister came down to visit me so we went to the Reading Terminal which is something that I suggest doing if you come to the city I think most cities have some type of like market so in New York there's Chelsea Market well in Philly we have the Reading Terminal and so there's a lot of different food options in here I just got some gated gumbo I think it was like eight dollars and fifty seven cents we can get cheesesteaks in here you can get pretty much anything you could think of and it's really really good I love this place so if you're gonna come here and you're looking for food or to do something in the city its central and I think it's a cool place it's a running terminal okay and that's all I spent for that day so it was pretty an expense for Thursday eight dollars and fifty seven cents and then on Friday I had a lot of my friends come and visit me so I'd eight people staying over in my apartment probably a bad idea to have that many people in this one apartment but so ended up taking everybody to get some cheesesteaks because I feel like I do this every week like somebody comes and visits and then they want to get some cheesesteaks so we just do a tour of the city and we end up going to gyms on South Street you could also go to Geno's or Pat's or Steve's or pretty much any other like Italian name you can think of has some cheesesteaks here but they're all really good and so I go to gyms it's where I take people and I was like nine dollars and seventy-five cents and then we went out to some places afterwards it's a couple bars I don't really go out to drink very much at all actually almost never just because I don't really like to I don't like drinking but I bought everybody around and there was a ten dollar cover so in total between the round and the cover it was sixty four dollars plus the cheesesteak the total expenses for Friday was about seventy three dollars and seventy five cents or I totally did that math wrong I don't know find out seventy four dollars or something like that a for Friday which is definitely more than I would spend on a weekend but I don't have a problem with this because I haven't seen my friends in a really long time and there's always going to be some expense whether it's like this you're going to a hockey game or you're going to an amusement park or something I generally like to a lot maybe like fifty dollars a week for some type of like entertainment thing on the weekend or something if some friends want to do something I'm totally willing to pay some money for that because it fits my budget if I was on a tighter budget I probably wouldn't go and spend sixty four dollars on a bar I definitely would not do that but like I said it's very rare I'll probably do this like once a month or once every other month so it's okay and it fits into my budget pretty well and then the next morning we went to IHOP I wasn't gonna you know give everybody peanut butter and jelly or something for breakfast so we just went to IHOP it was easier to do that and there's thirteen dollars and eighty-eight cents for that and pro tip here if you're going to go out to breakfast go to Denny's get the $4 bottomless pancakes it's a pretty killer deal you can get a Denny's but no there's no Denny's around here so I went to IHOP still pretty good 1388 and then today's Sunday so we're wrapping up the week Christmas is coming up right here and so that is going to be eight dollars to get the train back to my parents so in total for the variable expenses for this week is 152 dollars and 63 cents adding that with the fixed cost we're looking at about five hundred five dollars and 63 cents for the past seven days that I've spent and that's kind of averaging everything out if we're including rent and everything in there about five hundred and five dollars now I would say this is probably on track for average of what I typically spend I would say maybe I'll spend a little bit less on some weeks but then other times I'll spend a lot more and that's because I do a lot of traveling as maybe you know if you've seen some videos before on this channel or if you've seen me on Instagram anywhere you know that I do quite a bit of traveling but the way that I do this is I factor into my budget by just setting aside 5% of my post tax income towards the travel fund so even though I didn't go anywhere this week I took five percent of my income after taxes and I put it toward the travel fund so that in a couple weeks I think I'm gonna go to Mexico or I might go back to Europe for a little bit and I'll have that money kind of set aside and allotted for those trips and not travel so that's another part of my budget as well but that's essentially how I spend money this week like I said I'll go out to eat from time to time I'm not against it as long as you're not doing it all the time you're making a lot of food at home I think that's a big thing that's gonna save you money I also save a ton of money just on transportation because I'm able to walk everywhere I know a lot of people need cars because they live in maybe a rural areas or suburban areas they don't have great public transportation that's understandable that's just from my perspective from my point here that I end up saving a lot of money I think because I'm single I don't have any like kids I don't want dependents and so it's just you know I save a lot of money because of that because I just don't know where else to spend the money on so that's that's it that's that's how much I spend in Philadelphia for this week maybe we'll do a video next week about how much I spend over the course of this entire 2019 if you're interested in that let me know down in the comment section below thanks for subscribing thanks for dropping the like and I'll see everybody in the next video

Channel: Nate O'Brien

Views: 127,497

Rating: 4.937026 out of 5

Keywords: what i spend in a week, what i spend, nate o'brien, nate obrien, philadelphia, philly, how to save money, what i spent in a week, budgeting, cost of living philly, cost of living philadelphia

Id: nmicikfag5A

Length: 10min 56sec (656 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 23 2019