Alright, we made it to the end of month 2 in our Social Security budget experiment!
I’m including our last two weekends as a part of this last week.
Like I mentioned last time, we had to completely redo what how we did our budget to make it more realistic. We realized we could not have a car payment or a mortgage payment living on Social Security only.
I’ve included our tax bill, spread out over 12 months of our experiment, but to make it truly workable, I think we’d need to live in a smaller house with lower tax. At that point also, hopefully we’d qualify for an exemption if we were over age 65. (In the state where we live, there is a $4,000 exemption for those over age 65.)
No pets 😭
Probably the saddest part of the experiment so far — we would not be able to have our pups! Perhaps we could have one tiny pet that didn’t require much, like a lizard. But we are running into the challenge of how much it costs to have two high energy dogs that eat a sizable amount of food, require treats to keep our sanity, and of course need vet visits. Whenever we pay for their 3-in-1 heart worm, tick and flea medication, it is a whopping $400 for six months. (And there’s not really a way to reduce that cost that I’ve found, unless they go without it.)
Like I mentioned in the beginning, my muse for this experiment, my family member on Social Security, would like to have a pet, but she would not be able to afford one if it required emergency medical care. As we are finding in this experiment, that is a very real reality.
Of course, we’re not going to give away our pups just for this experiment. But this is something we’d need to consider when entering retirement and knowing our income will change.
Medical expenses
Another thing we noticed for this month is that we had a lot of our of pocket medical and supplements were higher than normal as we ran out of several things at once. So this put us slightly over budget for the month, by about $70. And this brings up a good thing to talk about — healthcare.
Healthcare costs are impossible to predict. But, we can safely assume they will go up as we get older and our needs for healthcare increase.
Our situation may be a little out of the ordinary as Justin has a condition that need to be managed by a doctor we pay for out-of-pocket. Due to this doctor being more knowledgeable than most, I also see him. But he does not take insurance. And we take supplements to help to manage our health. That is something that has become important to both of us as we realized supplements helped us to get out of the hole of chronic health conditions each of us we were suffering from.
So, with this in mind, we’d need to consider this also when planning for retirement.
No travel
Another thing we discovered was that we would not be able to travel. Justin visited his brother earlier in the month, and though that trip was probably the most affordable one could take, there were still expenses for gas and eating out that wouldn’t have been the case if he had been home.
In summary, for this month, I realized I could have planned a little better, especially with the supplement haul. But we do still have a lot of chicken burgers I bought on sale at Costco. So we are going to apply this month’s $70 deficit to next month.
Alright — now that the hard stuff is out of the way, let’s get to the fun stuff! Our last two weekends of the month consisted of going to a winery and then a hike. Both activities were very affordable, and fun!
Winery
Justin and drove around on this beautiful spring day to a winery. We grabbed inexpensive food on the way, so it was a really nice, low-cost outing.
Hike
The next weekend, we went on a hike and took the pups. It was cloudy, but the waterfalls were beautiful. I love getting out in nature whenever I can!
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The same day, we also came across a car show. They had some very cool hot rods!
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Meals
Here are also a few simple keto-friendly meals we made in the last week.
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Deals
I got a $10 gift card with Target’s sale last week, so I saved $10 on protein drinks.
We also got 50% off of some food storage containers. And we still have the chicken burgers I got on sale from Costco in our fridge. I saved about $20 buying several packages of those. Justin is probably getting tired of them by this point, LOL!
All in all, we went over budget a little, but I think we’re much more prepared for next month. We will apply this deficit to our next month’s budget.
SECOND BIG LESSON: It’s likely we’d not be able to afford pets living on Social Security. And we wouldn’t be able to travel! Unless of course, we had other money to live on besides Social Security.
ALT MONEY CHOICES 