(Following what other people has done: https://engineerseekingfire.com/may-2020-expense-report/ )
May is the month with lease spending even after we moved to Seattle, and also a two year celebration of us to move to Seattle, Join FB, and my son’s 6 year birthday.
This month we only spend $7159, including $3900 mortgage, purely due to the COVID-19.
Breakdown of expenses
- Home
- Mortgage: $3900, including insurance, this is usually the largest expense in each month, and this month contributes to 55% of total expense. Hope after Oct this year, when I officially with H1B status, I can do a refinance and reduce this number. Do not have strong incentive to pay off some of the loans.
- Other: $230 on a weber grill, which brought lots of fun and leisure food time for the family
- Grocery: $1100+, 15%, majorly from Weee and group buy with neighbors: fruits and seafoods
- Restaurant and Fast food: $250, a few deliveries, usually spend $1k before COVID-19
- Shopping: $1300, majorly from Amazon, and a $400 Video Card from Newegg and a $100+ case and $50 mouse from AMZ. Due to WFH and old PCs at home (both are build/manufactured in 2012), some of the parts are dying, and also want a SOIA 🙂 setting at home.
- Kids: $75 dancing class, and a $50+ LEGO, that is all for May. most of the gifts for Harry are counted in Shopping or last month.
- Others
- $50 gas
- $70 utilities: internet and mobiles, other utilities are either bimonth, or have prepaid in the account
- some recurrent spending: amazon music, Wechat Read, Disney Plus.
Summary
- $7.1k will be a local minimum (of not a globale one) for my family’s monthly expense, majorly due to the pandemic, there are 0 travel and almost 0 dining outside. Also we did not buy anything large this month.
- So $80k will be a minimum number for yearly needs, and $120k will be a safer number, thus $3M (based on 4% rule) or $4M (based on 3%) is what I need, given my current net worth, I will need …. Well I gave it up. LOL
- I am a pretty aggressive people in terms of stock investment (or actually speculation), so to have $120k passive income, probably actually need $1M investement in stock market. This year’s investment (STOCK+401K+IRA) return till today: -0.46%
There is still a long way to FIRE
