Save more for retirement. You can do more than 6%

Do you think we have enough wiggle room in our budget to increase contributions?

My friend, 1% is around $100. Eat a little less and you can save it for your future self.

It’s not hard to see why you don’t have much leftover. That’s a lot to spend on cars/car-related expenses. You’re at almost 17% of your take home on car payments/insurance/gas alone. That’s not including luxuries like pet grooming and dog walking.

The dog walking alone made me cringe.

>The dog walking alone made me cringe.

Why? $200 a month is actually pretty reasonable for a HCOL, is the dog supposed to walk itself if they are both working outside of the home?

You spend a lot on vehicles and pets. Those jumped out at me. Also food is kinda high. I don't have interweb I use my mobile Hotspot with unlimited data and it works fine. Phone is high as well. Mint mobile is super cheap. I used to have pest control. When I moved I dumped it and in 2 years haven't had a problem. Ymmv. You could free up like 2k if you get tighter with it

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Yes I do agree that we spend a lot on cars and our pet. I wish there was public transit in our city. We bought both of our cars used and commute to work. We are the type of people who buy a car and drive it until it dies. We are looking forward to paying them off and having that flexibility in our budget.

We both work on site and can’t come home for lunch to give our dog a walk. Our dog is a poodle due to allergies, so it requires grooming every 6-8 weeks. Can’t get out of that.

We do spend a lot on cars and pets. We drive our cars until they die usually. Our cars were both 20 years old and died on us, so we had to purchase a new set of used cars for both of us. Not ideal to have two car payments at the same time.

I’ll talk to my spouse about working on our food budget. That’s a good point.

We do live in an area with a lot of bugs. We tried giving up pest control and it didn’t work out well. We still get bugs inside with it.

I’ll look into mint mobile. I have been wanting to change phone plans due to the high rate.

LMAO. OP wants to cut expenses and save more for retirement. That's one that can easily be cut or at least reduced if they insist on paying someone else to walk their dog. Walk the dog in the morning or after work if you can't go home during lunch. It works for me. But I guess that doesn't work for everyone. I love dogs but I'm not going to sacrifice my future financial independence for one. I'm sure I will get dragged for that comment but oh well.

How are your dogs able to hold their bladder for that long? My dog has to be let out of the house to use the bathroom. I work 12 hour shifts, that’s too long to not let my dog to go the bathroom.

You should try budgeting "backwards" from what you're doing now. Mortgage and house stuff is a fixed cost, start there. Next is savings. Allocate what's left to expenses. Currently the $1174 "leftover" is your savings but any of the other categories could eat into it and you wouldn't notice because you're used to saving whatever's left after expenses rather than a fixed amount.

These look high to me

• Phones-130
• P Car Payment-700
• K Car Payment-422
• Car Insurance-242
• Car Gas-200
• Food-800

$200 each in fun money is very reasonable, but it seems like your cars and food are also expensive so I'd imagine some portion of that also counts as "fun".

You should probably put more in retirement.

I only work 8 hours and my dog is a 70# Pitt bull. He has a larger bladder. He actually doesn't drink enough water IMO. Now a little poodle, I understand the need to let it out more frequently.

Have you considered a doggie door? My ex boyfriend had a German Shepherd that used a doggie door. A fenced yard is a must, of course.