I finally was able to close the books on 2025--I was waiting days for NT to categorize two little transactions so I could be done!
Because of the way I work my budget it'll be a bit hard to get granular on numbers, but I'll do my best.
2025 - 2024 comparisons
In 2024 our projected budget was $71,606 in fixed income and $116,405 expected spending, which meant we need to come up with about $45K extra. Since AS and I keep 75% of our earnings, that meant we needed to make $60K. Overall, we brought in that plus some from our business and other sources (tax refunds, credit card rewards, NT's side hustle, but we overspent by $14K and had to take out about $10K on the HELOC to help cover it.
In 2025, our projected budget was $72K fixed income and $155,454 expected spending. We'd raised line items to match what we spent in 2024, and to have more money for travel and a couple other things. That meant we needed to come up with about $85K net or $116K gross.
AS and I came close, bringing in about $110K on our business, so much better than 2024. We also got $7K in other types of income such as an oil lease from some WV land. However, despite upping many of our budget line items, we overspent by quite a bit and had to borrow $17K out of our HELOC. So between 2024 and 2025, we now owe $26,700 on the HELOC.
Where did the overspending come from? A couple things would take a bit more effort to quantify, such as mortgage payments going up, just because of the way my spreadsheets and tracking work. But I can show the variable categories since I track those over the course of the year and have a final result on them, and that's where the bulk of the overspending happened.
Groceries: $16,100 budgeted; overspent by $1251
Healthcare expenses (not counting premiums): $5400 budgeted, overspent by $172
Barber & hair salon: $1440 budgeted, had $373 left over
Transportation: $2400 budgeted, had $284 left over
Subscriptions: $1200 budgeted, had $48 left over
Misc. houshold/unbudgeted costs: $4200 budgeted, overspent by $1197
Rental property expenses (not counting mortgage & utilities): $4200 budgeted, overspent by $338
Home improvement: $3,000 budgeted, had $26 left over
Vacays/travel (this was the biggie): $12,000 budgeted, overspent by $14,254
Giving: $900 budgeted, overspent by $424
Dates: $1200 budgeted, had $672 left over
Kid expenses (not counting summer camp): $3,000 budgeted, overspent by $1,290
Interest/fees: $600 budgeted, overspent by $691
Pets: $3,000 budgeted, overspent by $3,513
Family fun: $1,800 budgeted, overspent by $2,748
Camp: $6,000 budgeted, overspent by $53
The biggest thing was that we had a lot of travel that ate up our budget, but we really wanted a grownups trip to Europe which hadn't happened since 2018, so we basically put that trip on credit cards (and eventually the HELOC). The second biggest was caring for our sick cat. The third biggest overspend was family fun, various things but partly my bday party which ended up costing more than expected. And the next biggest was groceries, no surprise given inflation.
That's probably enough for one post, so I'll talk about my 2026 budget projections in a different post!
January 4th, 2026 at 10:47 pm 1767566843
January 5th, 2026 at 03:24 am 1767583466
January 9th, 2026 at 06:22 am 1767939735
January 9th, 2026 at 04:18 pm 1767975530
For the EU trip I know we spent about $4500 on airfare for 3 adults (MN to Porto, Porto to Barcelona, plus a single round trip from Barcelona to UK for NT to visit his fam for a couple days). I think another $4K-$5K on lodging for 2 weeks between the two cities. Probably $500-$1K on a day trip to the Douro Valley plus buying up some nice port, olive oil and honey and having it shipped home. Lots of good dining and shopping and touristy stuff for 2 weeks also. So yeah, that trip alone could easily have accounted for the full $14K over budget! We also had lots of other smaller trips between the 5 of us during the year that ate up the $12K that was our initial travel budget.
January 14th, 2026 at 10:00 pm 1768428049