What a weird month to start with!

According to Mint, we made $11,388 of income, including rental money from the UK flat and the US duplex. The total is distorted by the fact that I cashed out AA's CD and reinvested the money in her mutual fund. It also includes some work reimbursements and a couple of refunds. But it was a lean month for AS in terms of receiving freelance checks (even though she booked a ton of work).

Our spending for the month, per the tool, was $20,564! A crazy number, but it includes:
$1129 of AA's CD, deposited into Pax
$5284 for our UK plane tickets (which we saved up for and are paying off the CC for next week)
$2960 of retirement contributions (including quarterly SEP contribution for AS's freelance business)
$2300 in estimated tax payments for AS's freelance work
Total of the above: $11,673

So when you take out all of those unusual transactions, our spending was $8891. Still a lot, but at least less than we brought in.

I take the no-spend days with a grain of salt, since transactions don't always post the day I make them. (For instance, I bought the plane tickets and made several of the retirement contributions Dec. 31, but they're showing up in January). But it says we had two no-spend days, Jan 10 & 16.

The highest-spend day was Jan 5, at $9617 (wow!). That included the airfare, our US mortgage, and a Roth contribution. Other than that, it was $30 on shopping and $33 on groceries that day.

I think Mint values the duplex much higher than I do, and also counts the money in checking (which I dont' because it's allocated for bills) and savings (which is set aside for taxes so I don't count it), because it has our net worth at $590,489. I'll do our net worth shortly, but last month I had it just a bit over $500K.

So, it's a very interesting tool! It'll be good for getting an idea of how much we spend in different categories, even though I won't use it to manage my budget day-to-day. I like how it's mostly automatic (I just need to go in occasionally and make sure purchases are correctly categorized).