In my balance transfer post I mentioned that I currently put a big chunk of money away for retirement. I’m married, have a mortgage, and a kid, and well things are starting to get a little tight when it comes to my finances. No longer are there piles of money sitting around in bank accounts that I don’t know what do to with. In fact our cash flow is pretty much dead even or even going in the wrong direction the last couple months.

Well I figured I’d just do a high level analysis of where our money goes.

I get paid bi-weekly and make $2196 before taxes. That comes out to roughly $57,000

Taxes – $401.82/check $10,447.32/yr or (18.3%)
Health Insurance $197.28/check or $5,129.28/yr or (9.0%)
Roth IRAs $8000/yr or (14.01%)
Roth 401k $10,000/yr or (17.51%)
Mortgage/Heloc ($15,600) or (27.32%)

If you add up all of those percentages you come up with 86.14% or in other words minus our house we live on 13.86% of my salary or $7,913.50. Wow my wife is awesome, there aren’t too many women in this world that would allow a family to living on such a small allowance each year. I guess I’m a cheap bastard. Now granted my wife does do some part time jobs like susbstitute teaching, singing for weddings, tutoring, etc and she does make roughly another $2-$3k a year, but still I’m pretty darn proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish. I’m sure if I added in diapers and food and gas there wouldn’t be a whole lot left, which means that we despite my complaining about the size of our credit card bill that I have to pay off each month we aren’t exactly living frivulously.