This week, I’m talking about how I invest my money as a financial advisor. 

Today, I’m talking about how I spend my money as a financial advisor. If you thought that I managed the budget, paid the bills and took care of the finances in our household, you would be wrong. My husband is a CPA and he does all that. I’m thankful that he does that important task for our family, and it also means that I have a really good understanding of how we spend our money and where it all goes. He uses quickbooks and tracks our income and expenses pretty accurately, so here is a breakdown of our top spending categories as a % of our take-home pay: 

1. Housing - we spend 13% of our after tax income on housing. The average American family spends about ⅓ of their after-tax income on housing, which I have always been against. I’ve never wanted to be house poor, so we have always lived below our means in the housing category.
2. Our next largest spending category is cars. As I mentioned yesterday, my husband is a car guy. It’s his thing. He is happiest in the garage working on a car, washing his car, or driving his car. If I had my way, I would probably still be driving my 1997 army green Nissan pathfinder, because I’m so cheap and I loved that car, but my husband makes the car decisions for our family, and 
3. Our 3rd largest monthly expense is a tie between giving and childcare. We have 3 kids, we both work full-time jobs, so we have a part-time nanny and our 3 year old is in a montessori school. Kids are expensive. If you’ve been a listener of the one minute retirement tip for a while, you know how strongly I believe in giving. It’s been an important goal to increase our giving over the last several years and I’m very happy that this now has become our 3rd largest monthly expense. 
4. Next on the list is household expenses - this includes things like groceries, most Amazon purchases which are usually things like diapers or household items.
5. Finally, we’re getting to something fun. Our 5th largest spending category is entertainment - eating out and my golf addition are also included in this category. When we travel - it’s also lumped in with entertainment, but we generally don’t spend a lot here because we like cooking at home, we have 3 kids 6 and younger so we have no social life, and eating out and family vacations sound like some form of torture at this stage in our lives. 

I didn’t include saving for emergencies, retirement, and our kids college  in these calculations because I just looked at our budget from a monthly take home pay standpoint. I’ll be talking in depth about retirement savings tomorrow. 

Thanks for listening. My name is Ashley Micciche and this is the One Minute Retirement Tip.

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