One Dollar Allowance

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to set up our financial updates in this year. I didn’t like the format last year. I think I’m going to focus more on how spending changed month-to-month. Since my posts are late this month, this is written as of January 20, but didn’t post until today. I want to do several detailed posts about last year’s activity, this is going to be a shell of a look at our finances, and more of a “what have we been up to” type post. As a reminder, I usually post this around the 15th of the month because I can capture the mortgage payments made in the month (we pay our mortgages around the 10th, after all our rent is presumably collected).

RENTAL PROPERTIES

We left off last month with 3 refinances in which we took cash out. We paid off 2 mortgages with some of that money and have been looking at houses to purchase this month. We made an offer on one recently, but lost to another bid that was $5,000 more. We were about to make an offer on another one, but the HOA was $100 per month, and that really ate into our monthly cash flow. In this market, we’re not even close to our 1% Rule that we strive for (rent is at least 1% of the purchase price). Today’s deal I considered was going to be $240k purchase price with $1500 (maybe) in rent. We would have lost money every month with the HOA costs and such a low rent.

I’ve spent a lot of time managing these properties over the last month, which I’ll detail in another post.

One of our houses finally had the rental assistance check cut, so that’s 3 months worth of rent, going back to September 2021, that’s on its way to us. We’re waiting to receive a check for another property’s rental assistance approval, so that has us one month behind on that house. And the original house that applied for assistance applied again for January, so we’re waiting on 65% of that house’s January rent. We had to do pest control for mice on one house, and a toilet needed fixed on another.

One property’s HOA went up $10/quarter. I had already paid the $240 bill in December to count it as a 2021 expense, so I had to add $10 to that in January after I was notified of the increase.

EXPENSES

We had fraudulent activity on our main credit card, so that had to be closed and reissued.

Our swim lessons that were scheduled last March/April were finally rescheduled. That’s been $88 sitting in suspense – we paid for the lessons, they cancelled them, and then they kept our payment as a credit until they rescheduled.

We were sick the first week of January. Between our travel to NY in December and being sick for over a week, our expenses were pretty low this month. Our gas usage was higher than usual since we drove to/from NY. We hardly ate at restaurants, and our grocery runs were more focused on meals than just randomly buying things and hoping it makes a meal later.

Our electric bill was about half of what we expected it to be, so that was a pleasant surprise. It’s been colder this month, so I expect it to be back up to the $300.

NET WORTH

Our net worth increased by about $15k since mid-December. Our taxable investment accounts increased a good amount over the last month, but our retirement accounts took a hit. Our cash balance increased, and our credit card balances are lower than usual. Our investment property mortgages didn’t decrease the usual amount because we didn’t have to pay 3 mortgages this month due to the refinance; they only decreased by $671 worth of total principal.