How Much of My 2017 Discretionary Income Have I Already Spent?

If I estimate how much discretionary income I’ll have this year, can I control how quickly I blow through it?

So I wrote this morning that if I earn $60,000 this year—which is the low end of what I’d like to earn, but it’s always better to work from the low end—I’d have $9,500 in discretionary income after I set aside money for taxes, savings, retirement, and basic living expenses.

I’ll round that up to $10,000 because round numbers are fun, and then start subtracting:

$50 per month for haircuts, or $600.

$200 per quarter for clothes, or $800.

$100 per month for restaurants/outings with local friends, or $1,200.

$800 for additional travel expenses related to JoCo Cruise in March, including flights, rideshares to the flights, checked bags, airplane food, one night at a hotel, and drinks on the boat.

$1,500 for Christmas, which actually cost me $2,700 in 2016 including New Year’s Eve. (The majority of that cost can be attributed to air travel, including getting in and out of airports and feeding myself while inside. Also, I ended up taking five flights in eleven days, which is way too many.)

At this point we’re up to $4,900, leaving just over $5,000 for all business spending, travel to visit non-local friends/family, charitable donations, buying a sofa, buying books, and anything else that might come up.

Which, you know, might be enough.

Now let’s figure out how much discretionary money I’ve spent in the first nine days of the year:

• $69.64 on flying back from Los Angeles on New Year’s Day (the flight was already paid for, this was the cost of one meal and a Lyft back to my apartment)
• $110 on business
• $10.95 on Netflix (I guess that’s categorized as “anything else that might come up”)

I’m not counting the takeout I bought when I had a cold; that’ll get rolled up into my monthly food budget.

But so far I’m doing okay. I’ve spent 1.91 percent of my estimated annual discretionary income, and we’ve just finished 2.47 percent of the year.

The real issue will come when I want to attend a conference, or when my friends ask if I’d be interested in planning a weekend trip, or when something comes up that costs more than $10.95. I feel like I have to start thinking now about how much travel I want to do this year, and how many “career-building opportunities,” and so on—because otherwise I’ll say yes to everything that I’m excited about doing, and then I’ll run out of money.

Or I’ll earn more money, which is also a possibility—and I have written more than once about how career-building opportunities lead directly to increased income.

Mapping My Career Through Conventions

I guess we’ll have to see what happens next.

Do any of you do these kinds of calculations, at the beginning of the year? (Have I inspired you to start calculating?) Do you think of your potential annual income as a big pile, and start figuring out where that pile might go?

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