Yearly Spending Post Mortem 2009....Why Should You Do One?

I am a 'numbers gal'.....yep, the OCDness in me shows up as me being pretty anal about money and the accounting of it.  Hey, my father and one of my brothers were/are CPAs....I come by this naturally.lol

Every year in January I do a Post-Morten of our spending for the previous year.  I get out all the check registers and canceled checks, the bill receipts and invoices and even the cash register receipts if need be.  Yes, I save all that stuff in the short term to be able to do this.

I go through and add up what we spent our money on for the year.  I break it down into categories and then after I have the yearly total for each category, I find the average monthly amount spent.  It takes about 3 hours to complete if everyone leaves me alone for that long.lol

So I can tell you that in 2009, we spent $336 on garbage pick-up or $28 per month.  (No, this isn't included in the municipal taxes we pay here.)
And our landline phone bill was $266.98 or an average of $22.25 per month.

Why do I do this?
Besides satisfying my OCD, we can analyze where the $ went and maybe find where we spent too much or find places where we can change things up and spend less this year.

For instance....hubby and I looked at the post-mortem and saw that we spent a whopping $525.43 on long distance phone service for our landline in 2009.  We don't have a cell phone plan so we had signed up a couple of years ago for an AT&T flat rate long distance plan for the landline.  At the time we found we were making alot of long distance calls(between hubby's sibs and my sick brother in VA)and #1 son had friends who lived in OH he wished to talk to for HOURS on end.lol
At the time, that flat rate plan was very cost effective for us.

Now, we don't make all those long distance calls and #1 son is at college so we are overpaying for this service for the few calls we do make a year.  I had kept the service during #1 son's 1st semester since we thought he would get a landline phone there so we could call him if he needed us for something.  He never got the landline and he finds that emailing us is just as good as calling when he needs something.

So we are dropping this long distance plan.  For the little long distance we use, we will get phone cards to use with our landline.  I am figuring that should cost us approximately $100-$200 a year.  This will give us an extra $425-$325 a year to spend elsewhere in our budget or to drop into savings.

It's also interesting to see from month to month how spending changed or didn't in some categories.

I also found that I stopped using checks to pay for groceries altogether in June 2009 and began using cash only.  I found writing checks to cash and using that money to buy groceries/toiletries and keeping the receipts so I knew how much I spent of it on those items each month worked well for me.  Now and again though I do slip up and use the credit card to pay for groceries.  And when I do, it highly annoys me.lol

I wrote checks totaling $5,950 to cash and $1,224.91 in checks to specific grocery stores for a total of $7,174.91 in 2009.  As I spent a total of $6,254.84 on food/toiletries in 2009, that means I had $920.07 of miscellaneous personal spending last year.  This would be things like a tiny bit of gas(most gets put on the credit card tho), buying a drink or lunch out, money for the kids for movies or such, ice cream in the summer at the ice cream place, newspapers, parking fees, etc.  I didn't keep track of each little thing I spent it on, but it shows that those little incidentals DO add up!

For me, $920.07 on these types of purchases is NOT acceptable!
This year I am going to put a notebook in my car and try to keep track of all these little miscellaneous expenses in hopes of trying to cut some of it or at least have a more detailed list of where every penny goes.

Keeping a spending jouranl isn't for everyone, but if you are having a hard time getting a handle on where your money goes, it's a good idea/tool for at least a month or so to keep one to see where you are spending and how much.  It may surprise you to see what you actually spend on and how much over time!

Now to revisit my Grocery spending for 2009, it totaled $6,254.84. Averaged out over the course of the year, that's $568.62 per MONTH(for 11 months).
WOW!
That's quite high.

DECEMBER     $101.55
NOVEMBER    $202.23
OCTOBER         $48.20
SEPTEMBER   $170.93
AUGUST          $446.50
JULY                $520.69
JUNE                $699.91
MAY              $1019.36
APRIL            $1104.32
MARCH           $855.39
FEBRUARY  $1085.76

But if you look at it per month you will see that I was able to bring it down consistently from month to month until I started to get it under control in July.  By being a bit smarter with my spending, getting the stockpiling method going and upping my income with rebating we did much better by the second half of the year.  The 1st 5 months of 2009 we spent an average of $952.95 per month of food/toiletries.
The last 6 months of 2009, that average cost dropped to $248.35 a month!
Whatever I am doing here seems to be working.....

If you are serious about reigning in your spending, especially on food/toiletires, try tracking your day-to-day expenses for 2 months. 
It may be eye opening!

Sluggy