Nearly year end financial roundup

Another quiet weekend at home. I did some tax estimates and also getting caught up on my financial tracking. I started tracking spending on Jan 1 2019 and have logged every penny since. As of this evening my YTD spend is at 80.6% of my full 2019 spend. I still have a few November bills to pay and the full month of December ahead but look safely on track to be 10% or more below last year's spend.

10% would be a significant savings but I was actually hoping for more at the start of the year. 2019 had unexpected high spend on an auto insurance deductible and I had both paid off my the last of student loans and refinanced my mortgage for a significantly smaller payment. 2020 had a significant one off medical spend which more or less balanced the savings.

A portion of my 10% came from gas and food savings from the move to WFH, construction on my building led to several optional socially distanced office days so savings were not what they could have been. I also reshopped my insurance midyear, both home and auto had premium reductions due to changes in coverage. I probably should have done this earlier but WFH made me more comfortable with the increased risk.

Increased costs came from more groceries and I gave in and signed up for Netflix for some low thinking entertainment. I also surprisingly owed on both my federal and state returns. I do not track payroll tax withholding as an expense, only the settle up payments in the spring so this unbalanced the numbers. This surprise will work out to about 2% of my total 2020 spend.

Travel spending stayed more of less level. I had a winter getaway in February and had purchased several flights that I did not take, and am now holding Delta travel credit. Hopefully this is a more significant category in 2021.

Automate All The Things!

I have a much more complicated financial life than I need to but I want to optimize the small advantages to make something big. This has required being vigilant about balances, transfers, and due dates. I recently had a negative experience with my primary credit union that prompted me to fire them and reexamine how I have things ordered.

This was home to my primary transactional account and changing things was going to be a pain so I wanted to it once and correctly. In my previous post I had shared how I had put the the cell phone and electric bills on auto-pay to credit cards. This eliminated two monthly payments leaving my checking account which both simplified things some and cut my expenses by about $2 per month through credit card rewards. $24 per year saved simply by changing the payment method! I had read elsewhere of the strategy of depositing all money into a savings account and transferring to checking only to cover expenses and decided to implement this. I had a little used Capital One checking account back from the ING Direct days and found that they also were among the higher savings account rates available without jumping through hoops.

I set my paycheck to deposit to the newly created savings account so it would earn interest from the day of deposit and created a timeline of my known due dates to see how much needed to be transferred to checking and when. I then went into all my biller's websites and configured auto-pay from the checking account. This arrangement will net me 0.10% on the checking balance and 1.00% on the savings account, I am forecasting this will increase my earnings by about $35 per year over the prior arrangement through increased interest and delaying payment to due dates. It will also reduce the time required to keep my financial house in order without sacrificing the use of multiple credit cards to maximize the rewards.