review

2023 in Review: Personal Spending

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I’ve been working on the ‘year in review’ posts for 3 months. I really want to be consistent on tracking our spending and making sure I’m being intentional in our spending. Our main credit card had the nerve to tell me that it was exporting 461 line items for me to categorize and manipulate in Excel. We have 8 credit cards. So that wasn’t a fun realization.

Additionally, if I track it more than once every two years, I may be able to better categorize our spending. For example, a Walgreens purchase may be pictures that I printed, or it could be a prescription. My Amazon purchase may be clothes for the kids they needed, a gift for someone, something in the home improvement category, etc. The entertainment category can include exercise that we’ve paid for (e.g., 5K, ultimate frisbee, kids’ activities) or a trip we went on.

There’s also no direct way that I’m tracking where a credit card expense has been offset by someone paying us back. For instance, I put $980 on my credit card for a trip, but someone paid me $480 for it via Venmo. That offset is in my year’s total transactions, but not in a manner where I can capture it for this year-long-view of expenses. Additionally, we go out to eat at restaurants, but Mr. ODA gets paid for some of those as a secret shopper.

EXPENSES

This doesn’t identify the actual money spent in each category, but it shows how categories align with each other. To simplify this graph (and to allow all bars to even be seen), I combined several smaller categories into an overarching category. For example, the entertainment category includes anything from doing a brewery tour to traveling to another state. Home Improvement includes $10,000 worth of new carpeting, so it’s an outlier. This also doesn’t include expenses that were paid for out of our checking account(s); although nearly all of our expenses are paid via credit card to gain the rewards.

MEDICAL: We spent the first half of the year managing doctor appointments. They were mostly for the baby, and then halfway through the year, I started having serious vertigo issues. The baby was born a little early, had jaundice, diagnosed with reflux and put on medication, and then had trouble gaining weight. My 3rd baby then needed to have formula supplemented, after I nursed two kids and had extra milk to donate to NICU babies. That was an unexpected psychological and financial change. Once he started to become healthier, I hit a wall. After a week of wondering why I kept feeling lightheaded and dizzy, I woke up one morning not able to walk a straight line, and if I even attempted to, I’d throw up. I was diagnosed with an ear infection, which seemed to make sense, but the antibiotics didn’t stop the vertigo episodes. After several specialists, I was given the same thing that I always am: “your symptoms don’t fit neatly into any one category, and I don’t know what’s wrong with you.” Luckily, most of my symptoms have died down at this point. And thankfully, outside of random viruses and a bout of pink eye through 3/5 of us, the others were healthy.

SPORTS: We joined the Y and were really strong for the first 3 months. Once my mom died, I didn’t have it in me to go exercise, and then I got sick for most of the summer with that vertigo issue. Mr. ODA played softball, vintage baseball, and ultimate frisbee; I was able to play some ultimate frisbee and run a 5K. The kids did swim lessons at the Y (and was quite a terrible experience). Our oldest attempted soccer for the second time, and then cried through all practices and games. Our middle thrived in ‘acro’ for the second half of the year. I plan to finish our this semester with her in acro, but I think she’s going to love gymnastics after that.

TRAVEL: We traveled to NY for my mom’s funeral. I took 3 flights in a few days with the baby, all with points (which American Airlines was super easy to work with for last minute flights and using points). We went to the middle of nowhere Tennessee with Mr. ODA’s family, to NY two more times, a short family camping trip, to Indy for some kid-related fun, and a trip to Cincinnati to see Christmas lights and take the kids skiing for the first time. I bought myself new skis (I had been snowboarding for the last 13 years), which led to buying the kids ski equipment (although, it’s noteworthy that we bought them second hand and their skis and boots totaled $100 for two kids). That then led to buying mid-week season passes at our local ski resort. On top of our family trips, Mr. ODA took two work trips, a golf trip, and a mountain biking trip.

GAS: Typically, our gas usage can correlate to our travel because we usually drive somewhere instead of fly with 3 little kids and all the gear they come with. In June and November, we drove to NY, so those have bigger spikes in the graph below (June also included a trip about 4 hours away). In the beginning of the year, we were more interested in staying home because we had a new little baby, but we ventured out more towards the end of the summer.

RESTAURANTS: I was pleasantly surprised to see the amount spent each month in this category. I didn’t feel like we ate at restaurants all that much in the last year, but I was concerned with whether the numbers who support that. There’s an outlier in March because we spent a lot at one restaurant during the week of my mom’s funeral. On Long Island, food is a big deal; while every one else was paying for meals, I felt it was our turn. We don’t need to actually mention how much that meal was. May’s spike was simply the volume of times we went out to eat, and the majority of them being related to Mr. ODA’s secret shopper gig.

HOME: In July, we had a storm come through that wrecked our neighborhood. No one reported the damage to the National Weather Service, which makes me sad because I wanted to know if it was a tornado! We had several trees fall. One took out our deck, another took out our fence, and another cracked our driveway, but missed Mr. ODA’s car by centimeters. We fought insurance for 5 months, and now we’re in the queue to have it replaced some time late Spring.

CAR: We bought a car. That’s $6,000 worth of the “Home Bills” category. Since most of our bills actually can’t be paid by credit card, it’s surprising to have such a high category for that on the graph, but that’s why. They allowed us to do two $3,000 transactions on a credit card so we could get the points, and then we paid the balance by personal check.

GROCERIES: I’d like to watch this spending more in the future. A purchase at Walmart may include non-grocery items (e.g., shoes), but that is being lumped in with the groceries because I can’t possibly siphon out individual transaction expenses for an entire year in one sitting. So here’s a graph of our “grocery” spending per month, but noting such a caveat.

SUMMARY

While I know we’ve had some larger one-time expenses, I’m still not happy to see the amount spent in each category. I feel we’re diligent in our food spending, but I think we can reduce that amount.

I removed rental information, any rewards received, the $6,000 car purchase, and the $10,000 worth of carpet purchase to try to show that our spending is consistent month-to-month. Again, the baby kept us home in January and February, but we’re generally consistent in spending. I hope that I can review our expenses more often going forward so that I can more accurately categorize our spending.

Year in Review: Part 1

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Just over a year ago, I decided it was time to put more effort into sharing what we’ve been through. When I’m looking to learn something new, I like to find examples of how other people handle it. I want to know the places they struggled and how they learned. I find it a better way to form my opinion than by reading an article that doesn’t have any meat in it, only providing an outline.

In the last year, I learned that blogging wasn’t as easy to keep up with as I thought it would be. I have a list of topics still to cover, so it wasn’t a matter of content. But raising two kids hinders my ability for an uninterrupted thought process to write an article, unless I get to it before they wake up.

The blog was started by Mr. ODA in 2018. He wrote a few posts, and then it sat for two years. I decided to pick it back up in January 2021. During 2021, we published 65 posts. Each month, I wrote a post about our financial update; I included any major expenses, how management of rental properties was going, and how our personal spending may have changed month-to-month. I shared our purchase of 11 out of 13 of our properties, our sale of one property, refinancing mortgages, paying off mortgages, renting properties, maintaining properties, etc. I also shared just general life decision making along the way.

Part 1 for my year in review will address what happened with our rental properties. I’ll dive into our personal finances in Part 2.

As a quick recap, we have 12 rental properties. Nine of them are in Virginia, and three of them are in Kentucky. Two of the houses in Virginia are owned with a partner because we still had cash available to buy more houses, but at the time we had the maximum number of mortgages allowed by Fannie/Freddie (max is 10). The houses were purchased between February 2016 and September 2019. All 3 houses in Kentucky are managed by a property manager, who gets 10% of the monthly rent each month. I manage 5 of the Virginia houses personally, and then we have a property manager who manages the remaining 4, who also gets 10% for each house.

RENTAL PROPERTY MORTGAGES

In January 2021, we completed a refinance of one property, and then in December, we completed three cash-out refinances. The loan balances on these 4 properties increased; one increased because closing costs were rolled into the loan balance, and the other 3 included $190k worth of equity taken out from the houses and creating new loans.

We went from 11 mortgages (two of which are actually owned by a partner) down to 8. House 6 had a balance of $26,447 coming into 2021, and that was paid off by June. Two other houses had a total balance of $157,500 at the beginning of the year. Their balances dwindled through regular monthly payments and one lump sum payment right before we completed the cash-out-refis and completely paid them off.

We have been working on paying down another mortgage that is owned with a partner. Between the two of our families, we paid off about $44,000 additional principal for that mortgage. We’re matching each other’s additional principal payments so that the math is easier to follow, so we can only make additional payments in line with what he can do also. We each owe about $10k on this mortgage now.

Even though there were so many mortgage-related transactions in the year, our overall loan balance only decreased by $6,000.

The market has continued to rise due to the limited supply, and so our home values on the rentals actually increased over $500k over the last year.

RENTAL PROPERTY LEASES

We turned over 1 property the whole year! The tenant that was living there had already told us that they were renting until they found a place to buy, so we knew they wouldn’t be long term tenants. We had a relationship with them from a previous house, when they had moved out of the area and then back. They had a poor experience renting in another area and reached out to us since they appreciated us as landlords. They found a house towards the end of their first year, but we let them out of the lease early. Their lease was slated to end October 31, 2021. We don’t usually have leases that start/end in the Fall if we can help it, but we had let the previous tenant out of her lease early to purchase a house also. The tenant said she was able to be out at the end of August, and we preferred moving the lease closer to the summer months anyway.

We raised the rent on 6 properties.
– The one house that was turned over went from $1200 to $1350 per month. However, we added a property manager who gets 10%, so our cash flow only increased by $15 per month.
– Two of our properties have long term tenants; the rent is significantly below market value, but we value not having to turn over the house. These houses are on a cycle where we increase the rent $50 every two years.
– Our KY property manager tried to increase rent on the 3 properties she manages. One was increased by $25, another by $5, and the other one cried that she couldn’t afford an increase. That’s the one where we plan to increase by $75 next month, and if she doesn’t accept, we’ll turn it over and get $75-$100 more per month.
– We increased rent by $150/month for one of our properties that we have with a partner. It was a risk, but this is a house that claims 3 people live there, but they have 5 queen size beds in the house. We figured either they leave and we get several big things fixed up that have been deferred because of all their things in the way, or we make up for all the years that we didn’t manage their rent and didn’t increase it. They accepted the increase.

RENT COLLECTION

We were very grateful that we made it through those initial months of the pandemic without tenants not being able to pay rent. We had a few people let us know that they were laid off or unable to work (e.g., restaurant business), but we learned most of our tenants worked in the health care field. So while we made it through 2020 without many issues, 2021 brought more challenges. Nothing was insurmountable, and it wasn’t debilitating financially, but it was still something to manage.

We had some big struggles with non-payment of rent on one house. She was 31 days late paying August rent, then she didn’t pay September’s rent, and then she applied for rental assistance to cover September, October, and November, which we didn’t receive until February 2022. That was all on top of her generally being a week late in paying through the beginning of the year too. She doesn’t maintain employment, she doesn’t communicate, and we’ve just had something new and different pop up as an issue every few months. We eventually received January 2022’s rent, but we still haven’t received all of February’s rent – just in time for March rent to be due.

We have another property (the one that was raised $150 per month) that is perpetually late. They eventually pay, and they’re getting better about actually paying the late fee (when they pay rent 20+ days late…), but they were late for 10/12 months of the year.

Everyone else paid their rent on time. In general, we’re lenient with late fees and issues. If you reach out to us and mention that there was a hiccup and you’ll need one more pay check to pay rent, our response is typically: please pay what you can now, pay the rest next week, and don’t worry about the late fee. However, when you don’t communicate and/or you’re consistently weeks late and we’re having to carry the expenses, there needs to be a consequence to incentivize you getting back on track.

RENTAL EXPENSES

We replaced the flooring in House3 ($4,000), hot water heater in House9 ($1,500), HVAC in House10 ($3,300), washing machine in House10 ($250), and HVAC in House12 ($3,900). We also had various electrical and plumbing work that needed to be done in several houses. We also spend about $7k per year in property management fees.

Usually turn over is an area that requires us to put a lot of money into a house. Luckily, the one house that we turned over this year only required some paint work, and we didn’t have any other turnovers.

While it’s nice that our assessments have increased and our housing values have increased in our net worth calculation, it comes at a price. Our taxes have increased on all the properties. In total, they’ve increased over $2,500 in just the one year (meaning, that doesn’t include all the previous years worth of assessment increases that have occurred!).

GOALS

In this year, we hope to add one more rental property to our portfolio. We’ve been actively working on it, but this market is crazy! We’re not willing to overpay on a property and get into a bidding war just to be done with the search. It’s interesting to see that we haven’t bought a new rental property in almost 2.5 years, when we had purchased so many all at once. We had gone back and forth with saving for another down payment or just paying off more mortgages after we paid off House6 in June. Once the cash-out-refi was a possibility, we decided to go ahead with purchasing another property. We’ll self-manage whatever we acquire. We had been looking in Virginia and Kentucky, but have started to settle into a Kentucky property (I like the laws for tenant/landlord relationships better in Virginia) so that we can save the 10% management fee and the expensive leasing fee, since housing prices are significantly higher than what we’d prefer for the rent ratio we’d be getting.

We have 8 houses that still need negotiation and/or lease termination coming this year. Two houses have already agreed to their rent increase, and we just need to get the new lease signed. Five houses will be offered a new lease term with a rent increase (averaging about $50 per month on the increase). One tenant will be asked to leave at the end of her lease term.

We want to remove the tenant from House2 at the end of her lease term. She has been a concern in numerous legal ways, does not hold steady employment, and the house is well under market value rent. Turning over that property will require us to go to Virginia to work on it. It’ll need repainted, the carpet will probably have to be replaced, and I worry that she’ll do some damage when we tell her we’re not interested in renewing her lease.

SUMMARY

I like to look at the details of the rental properties all at once in this format. Sometimes, I get caught up in all the things that I need to get done, and I feel like it’s so much work. In those moments, I forget that there are most days of the year where I don’t even think about the properties. Even when expenses seem to be piling on top of themselves, to look back and see that our expenses totaled less than $15k over 12 houses is encouraging. We’ve also reached the point where we’ve replaced most HVACs and several roofs, which are areas that can create problems that compound on themselves, whereas a replacement is expensive, but then I don’t have to get all the calls that something went wrong.