- Mike Monfredi works as a forensic scientist and his wife Monica works as a dentist. They own and operate a dental practice and earn a combined six-figure income.
- They're also paying off $140,000 in student debt and preparing to welcome their second child.
- For Business Insider's "Real Money" series, Mike shares how they spent their money during a recent week, which ended with a much-anticipated vacation in Maui.
- Want to share a week of your spending? Email yourmoney@businessinsider.com.
Spending money intentionally is something my wife and I aspire to regularly.
We're young business owners (30 and 32 years old) who own our home and have a 3-year-old daughter with another on the way. For years, we haven't had the luxury of spending frivolously. …But we're making progress.
Personally, my current job duties include running our family's dental practice, working a different full-time job as a forensic scientist, and running my blog, MikedUp Blog. Busy doesn't begin to describe my typical day.
And I know what you're probably thinking — his highest budgeted category must be for energy drinks, Starbucks runs, and anxiety-related therapy visits…
But since we purchased our business about 16 months ago, subsequently relocated the office about 8 months ago, and have had some time for daily tasks and habits to settle out, my stress is currently at a healthy level. I do have an obsession with coffee, though — more on how that affects the budget below.
Our main financial obstacles now consist of us finding balance between digging out from a mountain of debt (student loans, business, and mortgage), while saving and investing for the long-term, and still trying to live our best life in the present moment (where's that guidebook?).
The good news is that we're starting to gain some financial momentum, and as our business has grown in the last 18 months, we're breathing a little easier during our monthly budget talk.
Because of the progress, my wife and I decided to book an 8-night Maui vacation. Call it a combination of celebration for our hard work and one last getaway before our new baby arrives. We'd been to Maui before, but this would be the first trip with our daughter and we were thrilled to bring her along.
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But before I get to my spending week, here's a peek at what our "normal" monthly spending looks like.
Our income tends to range between $9,000 and $11,000, depending on the month, so we've budgeted to make sure that our total expenses (including savings) are below the $9,000 low-end for income. I should also note that any business-related expenses are not reported in these data.
Housing is our most expensive category with a total of $2,130, plus utilities, while student loans are not far behind at $1,966.
We bought our house 3.5 years ago and had the option to purchase either a smaller and less expensive home or we could've literally gone for broke as we "qualified" for a much more expensive mortgage. We chose to land in the middle and couldn't be happier with our decision. Our home is close to parks, pools, a downtown area, and hiking/biking trails that connect everything. In the summer, you can't keep our daughter inside — and we wouldn't change it.
The student loan payment is relatively high when compared with many of our peers, but honestly, we're happy to have it at that level. The loans currently represent what we have left to pay on Monica's 4-year dental school program. Three years ago we refinanced and consolidated the total (near $225,000 at the time) to a 10-year fixed loan at 5.2% interest, which was much better than the 6%-8% range we had been paying.
Up until two months ago we had been driving 11- and 10-year-old cars, but a recent incident sent us back to the car market for the first time in a while. We did something I vowed never to do again in buying a new car, but our plans to pay off this loan early and drive our new Outback for another decade made us comfortable with the choice.
Aside from food/toiletries and the money that currently heads to our savings account (emergency fund), we have only one other expense over $500 — our monthly payment for childcare. This category will more than double when the new baby is born, but with the way we align values in our family, we're happy to pay a premium here.
Some other categories like travel, medical, and miscellaneous, which includes gifts and my gym membership aren't necessarily paid each month, but the annual payments (or large sum payments) break down to about these monthly costs. We have an automatic transfer setup into a separate account for these planned expenses — pretty much like an escrow account would hold taxes and insurance for your home… we just manage this escrow account.
This week we spent $919.33 — roughly 10% of our monthly income.
This week started like a normal workweek for our family and then come Friday, we took off for our 8-night tropical celebration/getaway. And surprise-surprise, our biggest spending days were Friday and Saturday as we traveled and got into our routine in Maui.
On Monday, my daughter and I bought groceries for the short week at home and we started preparing for our upcoming trip.
We were amp'd up for this vacation coming up on Friday but my wife and I still had four work days left for the week and we had to act like responsible adults until that much-anticipated Thursday afternoon.
One of my mantras is to never miss a Monday workout, and because we had been away visiting family the weekend before we also needed to make a grocery store trip. So I took advantage of our location and ran the 1.3 miles to my daughter's school to pick her up and then we walked together back home.
After our walk, we drove to the nearby store to pick up a couple of rotisserie chickens, some salad, and frozen ravioli ($47.63) that would make up our dinner for the night and a few lunches for the week ahead.
We're big fans of batch meal prepping for both the cost and time savings, and with all the packing and organizing we had ahead of us, it was nice to only have to cook once rather than nightly.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider