Why We Went $1,000 Over Budget…Again

Mindy:
Welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast, show number 284, finance Friday edition, where Carl and I go over our February finances. After you reach financial independence, you still need to know what your spending is because it doesn’t just go from, oh, I’m spending $3,000 to I’m spending $10,000 a month. It creeps up gradually so that you’re not really noticing it. And then all of a sudden you sit back and you’re like, oh, how much did I spend last month? Wow, that’s a lot. And you start thinking back, what did I spend it on? Do you know what you spent last week? I don’t have a clue what I spent yesterday. Hello. Hello. Hello. My name is Mindy Jensen and joining me today is my husband Carl, speaker at Economy Conference, host of the Mile High FI Podcast. The comedic genius behind the dinosaurs and fart jokes at fifteenhundreddays.com. What else?

Carl:
I think that’s about it. I’m a DIY person too. You can see my ear protection here and I’ve got something I’ll show the audience a little bit later in the presentation. Yeah. It’s pretty exciting.

Mindy:
A DIY person, and this comes into play with one of our big finance bills this month. So shall we jump in?

Carl:
Let’s do it.

Mindy:
Carl, where did we go right, and where did we go wrong?

Carl:
I think going wrong is the wrong way to put it. See what I did there. Our furnace died and it died on a Monday and I was leaving town on Tuesday. And this problem drove me a little bit nuts because I knew exactly what was wrong with the furnace, it was the motor, I went online and the motor was 90 bucks, but they’re hard to get. You have to order this thing and wait for it to show up. It’s not as easy as Amazon overnight. And I was going away and it was 13 degrees outside. So we had to call someone who had this in stock. So instead of the job costing me 80 or $90, it cost us $700 because the HVAC people just like an auto repair, they’ll upcharge on the parts and then their labor is expensive. And then Colorado is very expensive here because there’s such a shortage of people. So it seems like we pay twice as much for anything here.

Mindy:
This is probably the number two reason why we DIY everything. Number one is you just simply can’t find anybody to do it for you, to answer the phone call, to, when you’re trying to get quotes on something, you might call 10 contractors, three of them call you back, but only one of them shows up to get the bid and then they don’t even bother with the quote. It’s so frustrating, we just end up DIYing everything. But like Carl said, he was going out of town the next day. I know nothing about furnace repair. He’s Mr. DIY. And not to be confused with Captain DIY, Tinian Crawford, and who was on episode 44 of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast if you want to hear his money story. And we didn’t really have much of a choice because it was 13 degrees outside and there really was no way to heat the house other than, well, paying $700 for an emergency furnace blower. So we got that, which is great. The furnace is now running smoothly again. But yeah, that was a little bit of a pinch.

Carl:
Yeah, it sucked. The furnace must have knew I was going away. It knew to do that right before.

Mindy:
Hey, I’m glad it did it before and not after, what if I had been out all day long showing houses and then I come home and the house is 32 degrees.

Carl:
Ah, it takes longer for that than the pipes to freeze. And I think we would’ve been okay.

Mindy:
I don’t want a chance it.

Carl:
Well anyway, it broke my heart a little bit to spend $600. I could have got a pretty nice drone for 600 bucks and now [crosstalk 00:03:55].

Mindy:
You already have a drone.

Carl:
Yeah, but there’s better ones now.

Mindy:
How many times have you flown the drone that you have? Do you want to get into that conversation? Do you want to have that on TV?

Carl:
Okay. Next.

Mindy:
So, that was our big finance fail. But no worries, we have more. Gasoline has gone up. We are recording this on March 8th and, this is what? 13 days of the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, war, whatever we’re calling it. I should really figure out what that’s being called. I don’t think it’s fair to just say whatever we’re calling it. Let’s call it a war. And gasoline prices have started to go up. So I don’t anticipate our gasoline expenses going down next month, even though I don’t anticipate actually driving as much as I have been. I’ve been showing houses every weekend and that just takes a lot of gasoline. So, hopefully my driving will decrease, or gas prices will decrease, but not in the near future. So we have budgeted more for the month of March for gasoline. And hopefully that will fix it.
Household, if you’re following along at biggerpockets.com/Mindy’sbudget, you will see that household has been blown out of the water every single month in January. It was just running out of every day run out of the [mill 00:05:22] supplies. All of them all in one month. February was, we put the furnace part in household because we don’t really have a furnace expense. And this month household, oh wait, yeah, February was the furnace.

Carl:
Yes.

Mindy:
So that’s why household was extended. Our food budget, if you look at restaurants and groceries combined, we spent almost $450 more than we budgeted for. Some of that was, what did we do? We didn’t do anything. Did we? We didn’t have a big party or anything. We just ate a lot, I guess.

Carl:
Yeah. We had a couple of birthdays there. We took some people out for dinner.

Mindy:
Oh, yeah.

Carl:
One good thing, the Russian caviar. We’re not buying that anymore. And that flew out the budget.

Mindy:
You’re such a dork.

Carl:
I’m just kidding. We don’t eat Russian caviar, especially now.

Mindy:
We don’t eat any caviar.

Carl:
I’ve never had it in my life. I don’t want to eat any eggs, but chicken eggs.

Mindy:
I’ve got salt upstairs. You just lick the salt. It’s the same.

Carl:
You’ve had it?

Mindy:
Fishy salt.

Carl:
You’ve had caviar [crosstalk 00:06:31].

Mindy:
No, why would I put-.

Carl:
Well, you know what it tastes like.

Mindy:
Salt.

Carl:
How do you know what it tastes like if you’ve never had it?

Mindy:
Do you not ever talk to people and ask them what this caviar tastes like?

Carl:
I don’t know. People pay lots of money for it. It’s probably pretty good.

Mindy:
Well, we can digress a lot. We’re not going to. You don’t want any.

Carl:
What was our total spending for the month? We should say what that was.

Mindy:
Our total spending was $5,926 and 16 cents where we had budgeted $4,896 and 90 cents. So we were $1,029 and 26 cents over budget.

Carl:
Okay. Well that’s not so bad.

Mindy:
Well, but wait, there’s more. And a lot of that came from the furnace and the food, but in a lot of the categories, and again, you can go back to biggerpockets.com/Mindy’sbudget to see exactly what I’m talking about. A lot of the categories were still coming in under budget. So what we need to do is focus on these over budget categories and get those more in line with what we’re actually budgeting for. But also we need to look at what we’re actually budgeting for and see if that’s realistic.

Carl:
Yeah. The one thing that we didn’t talk about before, but went over budget, or we didn’t include it in our budget, is my travel. And I’ll take the hit on this one. I don’t apologize for it, because I enjoy traveling, but I went out to visit a friend in San Diego. Hey David, if you’re listening.

Mindy:
Hi David.

Carl:
And then I went to see my family in Las Vegas. There was an expensive one way car rental and plane tickets. I stayed with my friend. Whenever I do that, I feel like I should take them out to a nice dinner. So we did that at least once. Oh, it was great. We had a beer on Imperial Beach, it was wonderful. Anyone who’s familiar with… I wish I was still there. It’s like 13 degrees outside here right now and yeah, yeah, David, maybe I’ll be coming back. But maybe I should hitch hike to save money or something. I don’t know.

Mindy:
Yes. Please hitch hike to save money. Oh my goodness. You make me nuts. There are ways to say money and there are ways not to save money, and don’t hitch hike because that’s not the right way to save money. Also, what this points out, you just said, well, I’m not going to apologize for it. No, you shouldn’t apologize for it, but we should remember this when we’re sitting down doing our budget. A lot of this budget is just making stuff up. I really want everybody who listens to this show to think, oh, Mindy knows so much. She’s so smart. But a lot of this is just making it up, especially January was completely making it up. Oh, I’m guessing. I’m guessing. I’m guessing. And now as we move into March, I am making March predictions based on January and February spending.
So the food budget I have increased because we haven’t made our food budget either month, but also in March, I’m going to be really, really cognizant of what we’re eating and what can I pull from the pantry and make for dinner. So we’ve got friends coming over on Saturday. I want to make Enchiladas. I’ve got a lot of stuff in the pantry. I’ve got some black beans in the pantry. I don’t need to go buy black beans. I want to make sure that I am shopping in the pantry first, shopping in the freezer first and then supplementing with things that I don’t have as opposed to just going to the store and making a list of everything I need and then just going to store buying it all. I want to try and see if I can fit anything in from the pantry first.

Carl:
Yeah. Sounds good.

Mindy:
Okay, good. I’m glad you approve, because that’s how it’s going to go.

Carl:
One thing I’ve noticed about our budget, one final little comment is we’re going to spend a lot on travel this year. We’re going to be going to Seattle for spring break in March. And that’s probably going to cost us a little bit over $2,000 between the airfare, the hotel and the car rental. We’re going to be going to Los Vegas to see family in May. And then we’re going to go to, the big one is Germany and probably Paris in June. And that trip alone will probably be, I don’t know, four or $5,000. That’s a lot of money. So I think when we look back at the end of this year, the travel’s probably going to be a pretty out-sized percentage of our spending. It won’t be the biggest thing, but it might be the second biggest. And I think there’s different ways to look at it. I think one way to look at it is that’s a good thing if we really needed to clamp down, we could, we could just cut that out and we’d have $10,000 more in our budget and, where was I going with that?

Mindy:
I don’t know.

Carl:
So it’s a good thing. It might be bad we’re spending that amount of money, but that’s a conscious decision. We don’t have any family here. So whenever we want to see someone, they either have to come to us, or we want to go see them. And it seems like all that stuff costs a little bit more now, rental cars are ridiculous. Yeah. It seems like everyone wants to get out and about and see the world now that the pandemic is mostly over. I don’t want to jinx ourselves here, but the world is in a better place, at least as far as that goes. And we’ll spend a lot of money, but I’m okay with that as long as we know that going into it, we also do a lot of things like credit card hacking. So we minimize our expenses whenever we can.

Mindy:
Yeah. We should look into getting a credit card that allows us to earn points on international air carriers.

Carl:
Ooh, that’s a good idea. If anyone has one leave it in the comments or even a referral, yeah, we’re going to have to buy a couple three round trip tickets to Europe soon, and that isn’t going to be cheap and [crosstalk 00:12:24].

Mindy:
No, it’s not.

Carl:
… I don’t know how the dollar’s doing against the Euro with everything going on in the world.

Mindy:
It doesn’t really matter what it’s doing now. It could completely change by June when we go there. One point I want to make is, JT, I keep bringing you up JT, you asked us why we were going to be tracking our spending, what’s the point? The point is my furnace was going to go out, whether I was tracking my spending or not, we are going to go to Europe, whether we’re tracking our spending or not. And we are fortunate to be in a financial position where we can easily afford to go to Europe with our daughter who is, this whole thing is, it’s so bougie to even be able to go there in the first place, but we would be going there anyway, all this other little stuff, money just spends itself. If you’re not thinking about where your money’s going, it is going to fly out of your pockets. It’s just a dollar. It’s just $10. Oh sure. We can go out to eat tonight. I don’t really feel like cooking.
And it’s just, just, just, and all of a sudden you have spent $10,000 in a month when you really only think in the back of your mind that you’re spending three or four. When we made our FI number, we thought we were spending $3,000 a month and look at this, this month or, well, March, we have projected to spend almost $9,000 and $4 short of $9,000. So we are projecting to spend three times what we thought we were going to when we first made our FI number. So I think it’s really important to keep tracking your expenses as you go through your financial journey. After you reach financial independence, it’s not an end point, it’s not just Woo-hoo, now I don’t have to care anymore. There’s still the need to maybe not track it as obsessively as we do. We’re doing this on purpose publicly to show you our listeners, that it is difficult. It can be done. You still need to track your expenses, but it’s… Where was I going with that? See, that’s my role in this show, is I’m the one that loses track of my thoughts.
But after you reach financial independence, you still need to know what your spending is, because it doesn’t just go from, oh, I’m spending $3,000 to I’m spending $10,000 a month. It creeps up gradually so that you’re not really noticing it. And then all of a sudden you sit back and you’re like, oh, how much did I spend last month? Wow, that’s a lot. And you start thinking back, what did I spend it on? Do you know what you spent last week? I don’t have a clue what I spent yesterday.

Carl:
Yeah. Yeah. Everything should be thoughtful no matter what, I know money is a resource. We shouldn’t waste it. No one should waste it no matter how well they’re doing. It’s like time, gas or anything else, you should use it efficiently, I think.

Mindy:
Let’s talk about wins. Okay. We started off 2022 with dry January, because we ended 2021 with very wet December. And we have continued on, we haven’t been drinking nearly as much as we were in the past, which makes us sound like raging alcoholics. We’re not raging alcoholics, but we do like good beer and good alcoholic beverages. And we have been spending a lot less on alcohol. As you can see throughout the entire spending tracker, we have done really, really well on that so far.

Carl:
Was it zero for February? I think so. I’m not going to make [crosstalk 00:16:05].

Mindy:
No, I think we spent $10.

Carl:
Okay. Well, that’s pretty good.

Mindy:
But yeah, $10 and I budgeted for a hundred. So another win was gifts. We had some pretty easy birthday gifts for last year or last month for February. And we, when did we refinance? In December, November or December? We refinanced our mortgage. So we know our principal interest taxes and insurance. We know all of that expenses for the entire year are not going to change. We just got our tax bill, which was very fortunate. I started tracking our expenses and then our tax bill came. So I was able to bump that up in February, to be consistent with what our taxes actually are going to be. And we will have no problem budgeting for that. So major household expenses, well, not even major household expenses. Our household expenses are more than our mortgage, but our mortgage payment is, we’re doing well on that.
Things that we need to consider are, we’ve already talked about travel and we need to be more conscious of how much we’re spending. I think we have made the decision that we are going to log the expense in the month that it is being consumed with regards to travel. So even if we get smoking hot deals on airfare in May, we’re going to log those in our June spending, which I think is fine.

Carl:
Yeah.

Mindy:
Because it’s our budget and we can do what we want with it.

Carl:
Yep.

Mindy:
But our utilities are a squidgy mess right now. We bought this house two years ago and we put solar panels on, when did they go live? In November or December?

Carl:
November.

Mindy:
November, the end of November, our solar panels went live, meaning they started generating electricity and sucking up the sun and then snow. We haven’t made a lot of electricity from it, and we’ve still made a lot. We’ve just had a lot of snow for January and February, more snow than normal

Carl:
With that though, with that said though, we are still ahead. We have put more electricity back into the grid than we have drawn out.

Mindy:
Oh yay. And our city is very fortunate. They’re very, very generous. We are very fortunate they are very generous. They pay us retail rates. So when we use a kilowatt of electricity and then we give them a kilowatt of electricity, we’re even, right?

Carl:
Yes.

Mindy:
Okay. We do have a $20 charge a month, but whatever. However, our gas utility was not transferred into our name, and he doesn’t want me to say anything about this, but I’m going to say it anyway. We don’t have no idea how much it costs for gas for this house, because for two years we didn’t pay it, or we didn’t really notice that we weren’t paying it, because I thought I had signed up. I called every utility company and transferred utilities into my name. Somehow this one didn’t catch. And when we did the solar panels, I was looking through my email, his email, where is my gas bill? I called them up and they said, we don’t have your name on our records. So I got it changed into our name the.n I asked them if they could back bill us. And they said, no, we can’t. I’m like, that’s it. We are really just stuck with this? They said, yep. The bill’s been paid every month. So we can’t go back and tell you what it was, how much it was because it wasn’t your bill to pay.
So I get what they are saying, but I feel really bad that somebody else was paying our bill for two years. But also if you’re paying somebody else’s gas bill for two years, you should notice that.

Carl:
Yeah. That was pretty weird, especially since I remember we tried to change it.

Mindy:
Yeah. And there was that weird thing with the HQ too.

Carl:
Yeah.

Mindy:
This was not the first time, that makes us feel, we sound even worse now. This wasn’t the time that our gas bill didn’t get paid by us. But that was a weird, we tried, we are trying to pay our gas bill and nobody’s letting us pay this gas bill. Anyway, we finally got it all started out, but I’m still figuring this all out. So apparently we had to put a deposit down on the gas company, and now I can go back in and attach my checking account to the gas bill and then the deposit comes off. So hopefully this will all shake out in March.

Carl:
Yeah. It’ll be fine.

Mindy:
Yeah. And we downsized on, we didn’t even talk about that. We downsized our garbage cans.

Carl:
Oh yeah.

Mindy:
So we have a giant garbage can because that’s how our city collects garbage, and we didn’t need the giant can. I thought we had had a conversation about downsizing to the smaller can that gets picked up every other week. I guess you thought we were just going to the smaller can that gets picked up every week. So right now we’re working that kink out. But we have downsized to less than half of the cost of our garbage collection.

Carl:
Yes.

Mindy:
Okay. So that’s going to switch, that’s going to shake out too. So hopefully our utilities will be lowered and I would like to take this moment to invite you to review your utility bills and your utility usage and see if there’s a way for you to downsize your garbage can if you have specific size garbage cans in your city, or downsize your utilities or make sure you’re paying utilities. I’m still embarrassed about that.

Carl:
Yeah, we tried.

Mindy:
Yeah. Two years later, I guess. Okay. So what is this thing you’ve got in your lap? A great segue.

Carl:
Yeah. Austin Powers is one of my favorite movies and I was going to do a Dr. Evil imitation where he’s the cat, that nasty hairless cat is on his lap and he’s stroking it and doing this or whatever. Do you remember that scene?

Mindy:
Yes I do.

Carl:
Okay. So anyway [crosstalk 00:21:47].

Mindy:
I wonder where you’re going with this.

Carl:
Yeah, that’s a pretty bad… I don’t know where I’m going with this.

Mindy:
Watch the video. It doesn’t explain anything any better.

Carl:
This is a professional outfit, but if anyone can see what this thing is, it is not a cat and it is not a [inaudible 00:22:02] anti-tank weapon, which [crosstalk 00:22:05].

Mindy:
Turn it towards the camera.

Carl:
Okay. Yeah, it is a duct fan. And what this does is, you stick it in your heating duct, I’m going to have to cut the ducts apart. This is going to sit in between, and it takes the air and shoots it out stronger. And the reason we have this is because Mindy’s office is at the end of an HVAC run and it is very cold in there. It only gets up to about it’s 72 and she likes at about 92 in there.

Mindy:
Oh, shut up.

Carl:
But her office [crosstalk 00:22:35].

Mindy:
It is freezing in my office. It never gets warm in my office. And rather than listen to me, continue to complain. My darling husband, sweetheart, amazing wonderfulness, is going to put this fan in there so I’m not freezing anymore.

Carl:
So what Mindy has been doing is running a space heater in there which uses about, do you know how many watts that uses per hour?

Mindy:
I have no idea.

Carl:
Yeah. See, 1500 Watts an hour. That’s 15 cents of electricity. And one time [crosstalk 00:23:04].

Mindy:
Are you kidding me? 15 cents of electricity that we make for free.

Carl:
Per hour. Anyway, there was one time [crosstalk 00:23:12].

Mindy:
You’re in so much trouble when I turn this off.

Carl:
That’s fine. I’m about to be in more trouble. There was one time when we went away for the weekend and someone, I won’t say who, but it wasn’t me, left the space heater on for the entire weekend. So that’s 10 bucks in electricity, at least 15 cents. Yeah.

Mindy:
I am a wattage waster.

Carl:
You are the wattage waster, does anyone get that reference? So what this will allow us to do, this will make the room warmer by pushing more heat through her vent. And we’ll be able to get rid of that wasteful space heater. So going to be awesome.

Mindy:
Thank you. I’m very pleased at this. And how much did this cost?

Carl:
This cost about, it was an Amazon warehouse deal, which means someone returned it, but it’s in new condition. So it was $90. So the payback period will probably, it’ll be a season probably, but I’m not sure, it’ll be worth it.

Mindy:
Okay.

Carl:
It’s all for you and your comfort.

Mindy:
Aw, Thank you.

Carl:
Do you want to give it a kiss?

Mindy:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Carl:
Wow. I didn’t think she’d actually take me up on that, but she won’t give me a kiss.

Mindy:
Oh, stop it.

Carl:
It’s fine.

Mindy:
Okay. So let’s talk about going forward in March. We have allocated, like I said before, our budgeted amount of spending for March is, stop that, that’s making noise. He can’t sit still. He’s Mr. Fidget pants, our budgeted amount of spending for March, stop, why are you so weird?

Carl:
I’m like Dr. Evil. I’m stroking the dinosaur.

Mindy:
That sounds really gross for people who are not watching the video.

Carl:
See. Yeah.

Mindy:
I think that’s a dragon.

Carl:
Yeah. If you’re watching it on YouTube, there is a, yeah, a dragon horn [crosstalk 00:25:02].

Mindy:
It’s a pink little people dinosaur or dragon. Anyway, nobody wants to hear that. Okay. So for March, we have budgeted $8,996, which is a lot of dollars. What are you doing?

Carl:
But half of that, there’s 2000 for the couch. We went out and bought a couch. It’ll be probably the last big piece of furniture we buy for this house and an [inaudible 00:25:24]. And the other 2,500 is for our fancy Seattle trip.

Mindy:
Yeah. So that is, I don’t want to say a one time, well, the couch is a one time purchase and the travel is, we’ve already talked about that. We’re going to go visit friends and we’re going to some of the San Juan Islands and staying out there is expensive and, oh, hey, what kind of rental car did we get while we were out there? Did we get a really cheap rental car?

Carl:
I went and looked at the price of rental cars and they were all very expensive. So that’s the excuse I make for myself. We went on Turo and they had a Tesla, which was a little bit more, but not that much more than a normal rental car. And it might actually work in our favor because this one has free supercharging. So we don’t have to pay for any gas. We can put a thousand miles on that and not have to pay a thing. And it was a cheap Tesla, it’s a 2013 model, that’s a cheaper one. And that’s on me.

Mindy:
That is all on you. And I hope you love it. And I hope you want to buy one when we get back. So you’ll stop talking to me about it.

Carl:
Wow. So I have another question about our Seattle trip.

Mindy:
Okay.

Carl:
Earlier this morning I asked Mindy if we should go up to the top of the Space Needle. And I was hoping she’d say yes, because I’m a, I don’t know if this is specific to guys, but I like going to the top of things. If I can get to the top of something, I like to do it, hotel roofs, anything like that. I’ll probably get in trouble someday for that. But anyway, it’s fun to go on top then you can see everything but… So Mindy’s like, yeah, let’s buy the tickets for the top of the Space Needle. Do you know how much it costs to go up there?

Mindy:
No.

Carl:
It’s 35 bucks for an adult ticket. And then I think 16 for kids. So if we do, it’s going to be a $102, and that probably doesn’t include taxes.

Mindy:
Okay.

Carl:
Okay. So do you think it’s worth it to pay the hundred bucks to go to the top of the Space Needle?

Mindy:
How frequently do we go to Seattle?

Carl:
Not frequently. This is the girls the first time?

Mindy:
Do we have a Space Needle in our neck of the woods?

Carl:
No.

Mindy:
Can we afford it?

Carl:
Yes.

Mindy:
Will it cause any dent in our finances to do this?

Carl:
No.

Mindy:
Do you think the girls will enjoy it?

Carl:
Probably.

Mindy:
I would say yes it is worth it, because we can afford it, and it isn’t something that we can do at home. We’re not going to Seattle every single week and going to the Space Needle every single week. We probably won’t go back to Seattle for years.

Carl:
How much time do you think we should spend at the top of the Space Needle to make the experience worthwhile?

Mindy:
Why are you putting me on the spot like this? I don’t know. How much time do you think we should spend?

Carl:
I’d say at least 45 minutes. We should go up there and, I think they’ve got actually a restaurant or bar up there with a glass floor or something like that. It’d be cool to [crosstalk 00:28:22].

Mindy:
I guess we’ll learn.

Carl:
… go check that out. Sounds terrifying fine too, but I’m sure they figured it out it’s not going to break. Don’t drop the beer glass on it.

Mindy:
Well, okay. So as we move to March, we are changing the way that we are thinking about our spending, which I think is really important, while also still being conscious of our spending. Oh, you know what I forgot to talk about? Is that in February, when he had left for his trip to visit our friend David, and then to go to his mom’s house, that weekend I was left alone at home on purpose. They didn’t forget me. We planned this, this way. And I was bummed that we had already blown through our February spending already. So I had actually stopped tracking my spending that whole weekend and I didn’t enter any expenses into the spending tracker. And then it was, and on purpose, I had to force myself to start tracking them again once you guys came back. And it wasn’t like I was slacking off because you weren’t home. It was just, oh, I don’t want to do this right now, or, oh I forgot or whatever.
And I started thinking, wow, this is mid-February. This is when people’s new year’s resolutions all stop because it’s not new anymore. It’s not fun. It’s not exciting. And I have not seen any results. I haven’t, if you are on a diet and, oh, I had a salad today, how come I didn’t lose 10 pounds? I’ve been tracking my spending for a month. How come I’m not crushing it in my spending? Now two months in a row, I’ve already had this unexpected expense that blew my budget. So I started to think about it. Those unexpected expenses would’ve still happened if we weren’t tracking our spending, but being conscious of it helps us keep all the other things down, all the other expenses, all the other spending down while these things flare up so that our whole entire financial situation doesn’t just blow up.

Carl:
Yeah. We have Space Needle money.

Mindy:
Now we have Space Needle money.

Carl:
Is there anything else you want to do while we’re in Seattle or?

Mindy:
Is there anything else I want to do while we’re in Seattle? I definitely want to get coffee. I want to go to the fish market where they throw the fish around. I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it. What do you want to do in Seattle?

Carl:
Well, our friend Ray, hey Ray, said there is a really good deep dish, like Chicago pizza place. And I think it’s actually called West of Chicago. So it seems weird to go to Seattle and have a deep dish pizza, but I’m a sucker for a good deep dish pizza. And we’ll have some seafood too. That’s probably what Seattle’s known for.

Mindy:
I would like to do the seafood.

Carl:
Yeah, let’s do that.

Mindy:
Okay. Do we have anything else we want to say about our finances before we get going?

Carl:
Yeah, I don’t think so. Well, maybe the one last thing, it’ll be interesting to see how bumpy our finances are. I think in some months, do you remember what we spent in January?

Mindy:
5,000.

Carl:
Yeah. So I think our months are going to be drastically different with the travel. June will be very expensive because we’re going to Europe and then July, I think we’re not going anywhere. And same thing with the rest of the summer.

Mindy:
July we’re going to CampFI Rocky Mountain week two.

Carl:
Oh yeah. But CampFI is pretty cheap. It’s a financial independence thing. So shout out to CampFI if you’re going to that.

Mindy:
Ooh. Now here’s a question, we already bought our tickets in November or December. Do we put the charge in our July spending, even though we bought them way back when?

Carl:
Or could it be a business write-off? I don’t know. We’re going to record a podcast there and maybe speak and do other stuff. I don’t know what the limits of that is. I’ll have to talk to the accountant, but is there a Space Needle in Colorado Springs?

Mindy:
There is no Space Needle in Colorado Springs. I’m sorry. So we don’t need Space Needle money.

Carl:
No, they do have that train that goes to the top of the mountain, that’s pretty cool.

Mindy:
That is cool. But that’s not Space Needle stuff.

Carl:
Yeah. It’s probably it’s at least as expensive as the Space Needle, t’s like 50 bucks a person. You could walk up to the top of Pikes Peak too. Save the $200.

Mindy:
Boy, that’s a tough decision. Okay. So CampFI, it’s C-A-M-P-F-I.org if you want to join us, I don’t know if Rocky Mountain is sold out or not. CampFI.org. They have camps all around the United States. And it’s a really fun time. You get to spend a long weekend with people who are just like you on their journey to financial independence. And there are speakers and Steven Boyer runs it. And it’s a great fun time.

Carl:
And there are also singers. And one crazy twist this year, Mindy has started work on a musical, I think it might be [crosstalk 00:33:38].

Mindy:
Oh, shut up.

Carl:
… the simple path to wealth, or there’s some folks that are going to [inaudible 00:33:40].

Mindy:
Stop.

Carl:
And Mindy is going to sing a song in there and she might preview it at CampFI. It’s going to be awesome.

Mindy:
Lies.

Carl:
What’s it called, your song?

Mindy:
Stop telling lies. It’s called my husband tells lies all the time.

Carl:
I’m saving and I know it, like that sexy and I know it song. I’m saving and I know it.

Mindy:
No.

Carl:
Sing it.

Mindy:
No.

Carl:
Come on.

Mindy:
Okay. The end, from episode 284. Should we get out of here? I should ask that.

Carl:
Yeah.

Mindy:
Okay. Did we mention any links? We mentioned a few links. Any links that we talked about will be in the show notes, which can be found at biggerpockets.com/moneyshow284.

Carl:
And maybe we’ll see you in Seattle, Colorado Springs, Germany, or where else are we going? I guess that’s it.

Mindy:
Oh, we’re going to so many places.

Carl:
I don’t know.

Mindy:
Las Vegas again.

Carl:
Oh yeah. We have to go to Vegas again.

Mindy:
Ooh, they’ve got a fun real estate meetup. I might reach out to Spencer and Jay Miranda and talk to them, see if they’re going to have [inaudible 00:34:44] all in there.

Carl:
Yeah.

Mindy:
That’d be fun.

Carl:
Yeah.

Mindy:
Okay. Then we are going to leave you. Thank you so much for listening to our finance recap for February. Please send us notes, questions, hit us up with comments and we’d love to hear from you. Do you have an email address? Do you want to share with people? I’ll just give them your phone number.

Carl:
[email protected]

Mindy:
Just DM me for his phone number. I’ll give you his phone number. And you can email me, [email protected] and you can join our Facebook group at Facebook.com/groups/bpmoney. Okay. That’s a bunch of links right there at the end. And again, all of these links are found in our show notes at biggerpockets.com/moneyshow284. All right. From episode 284 of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. He is Carl Jensen and I am Mindy Jensen saying, do you have a fun see you later alligator kind of thing?

Carl:
No. Bye.

Mindy:
Wow. Okay, bye. That wasn’t very fun at all. People are never going to think you’re funny. What about all your dinosaur and fart jokes?

Carl:
I used all my material in the course of the recording.

Mindy:
Oh, that’s not selling it at all.