Married folks, what’s your average monthly expenses?
This should include everything from home bills, entertainment, medical expenses, trips etc. When I was single (back in 2016), my expenses were around 20k per month.
Now I easily go above 1L every month (without rent, we live in our own house). My wife also works and she has her expenses too.
Not sure what’s the reason for it though. We live frugally and don’t spend lavishly (atleast I don’t think we do). I barely buy anything for myself (I use 1k earphones and buy clothes from decathalon). My wife is the same.
Is this common when you get married? That your expenses permanently increase? Or is there something I should be worried about? TIA
Talking product sense with Ridhi
9 min AI interview5 questions
20 K + 20 K in 2016 -> approx 35 K + 35 K = 70 K (assuming 7% inflation over 8 years).
Extra 30 K can be attributed to your lifestyle increase, going out more often , more food ordering , better furniture, gym, medicines, insurance premiums , vehicle purchase, and maintenance if not included etc.
I found myself in a similar situation. I was hardly able to figure out whats going on. So this is what I did.
-
Track all our expenses across three months. And differentiate into categories. I have like 12 categories I think.
-
Then I revisited these categories into essentials and unnecessary/wants.
-
Revisited the numbers I can spare and have to spare for each category.
-
Created a joint Account for me and my wife. Setup SI to transfer our monthly budget calculated from above.
-
All expenses will come from that.
After following this it has hardly crossed the limit and then if for some reason it crosses we are clearly aware what might have caused it. Like one time purchases like phone or some vacation. We have separate funds for these so we know that we are not crossing our budgets.
Only thing that we need to be aware of is what are wants and what are needs. how much I am willing to spend on my wants and am I spending too much in the name of needs.
Oh wow, this is fantastic! Curious to know your 12 categories and rough budgets for it. If you can, pls share. I’ll create my spreadsheet too then
Create an excel and make a habit of entering pareto expenses every month (The count would be at best 20 items).
For us
Rent- 60k
Travel- 30k (Due to a lot of weddings or travel to meet parents)
Grocery - 10k
Househelps- 10k
Weekend outings- 10k
Misc- 30k
We too barely spend on shopping but when you live in a tier 1 city 1L per month would be minimum expense per month. However your expense seems to be on the higher end given you don't pay rent.
How closely do you keep track of your spends? Do you budget at the start of every month?
If you alone are spending about 1L and your wife has her expenses over an above that then I feel something's amiss. Do you spend more on experiences instead? The number looks fine if you are having kids though, or even a home loan EMI. Else this doesn't look frugal IMO.
It’s hard to track it month over month. I mean I just see spends summary on cred and it’s mainly travel, Amazon home shopping or medical expenses. How do you track your spends month over month with your wife? (across CC, UPI etc)
If it’s am android phone, there are bunch of apps. If it’s ios then it’s tough.
I ended up creating a shortcut for it which basically breaks it down and updates an excel.
I use axio to track my expenses. It doesn't require any crazy permissions like reading bank account statement etc. It maintains records based on the messages. Twice every week I just make sure to remove any duplicate expense, add expense maid without my phone and properly categorise them. It's great and it's free.
To me the "inconvenience" of skipping ads and avoiding spam calls is far less troublesome than the inconvenience of having to manage my expense on Excel.
In age of UPI, Adding records manually always takes more efforts and is error prone compared to consolidating auto tracked records against bank statements weekly.
We use splitwise to track and share expenses. Average spend ~ 2L/m Rent:80k Kid school:40k Help: 25k Grocery:10k Electricity:10k Others:10-15k Plus 2 travels per year at 2-4L per travel
25k for help? Is she/he like available all time?
Yes, 24 hr help and a cook
DISK . we do live frugally , dont go much out or to movies . Overall spent is around 80k per month including kid’s school fees , insurance payments, home loan emi etc.
How about travel and hotel cost. For me if I plan any travel it impacts that month and next while paying cc bill.
Yes, but I’m talking about the monthly average over the last 3 couple of years. Travel and hotel are all included in this. We spend 3-4L on our travels every year which is split between my wife and I.
Then if I divide 4 lakh in both you and your wife and given how you guys spend your bucket will be 3L which leaves you with 9L per year. I believe this is quite common. If you see on high level maid, cook, maintenance, electricity and water bills alone can range around 3L and then grocery, food outside, shopping, vehicle, any other hobby it's around 50K that you are spending which imo is normal in cities like Bangalore, Mumbai etc.