Critique my budget

Title says it all. Incoming analyst. Trying to figure out where to cut back and where to splurge. Hoping to save about 15% after tax and 401k as seen here. In NY for reference. Column 1 is yearly, 2 is monthly and 3 is weekly.

Budget

30 Comments
 

what are the columns? can you clarify?? why so much on dinner? pls fix

 
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If healthcare includes the gym that will be low (unless your firm subsidizes or you have a gym in your building). For the nicer gyms in Manhattan you are looking at $250-300 a month. 

Do you need to buy anything for your apartment? Mattress/bed? Other furniture? Plates, etc?

Are you planning on taking any trips? I would make sure to include those in your budget 

Other than that, the numbers mostly seem fine (dinners are high but I actually think pretty accurate if you like to go out and have nice meals, drinks, etc). I recommend you track them for the first few months. It can be very easy to get off track (dinners get more expensive, friends ask you to join a trip to ski, hamptons, etc, you go on a few dates and pickup the tab, you get the picture). 

 

Supposing you're on 110k base salary, and contribute 5% personally to your 401k, that leaves ~$71,000 post-tax income to spend in NYC, or $5900 per month.

Your expenses total 3000 USD per month plus 2250 USD for rent. In other words, 5250 USD per month. That means you're saving 11% of your take-home, and even that's assuming the low healthcare #s as someone above mentioned.

You can probably use your sign-on to pay for all furniture, so you can forget about that; similarly, pay for trips with your EOY bonus. I'd personally cut down the dinner costs, $1000 per month seems like a lot for an A1. And misc spending, try to caution yourself with buying nonsense items. My take at least on how to get the number up to 15%.

 

dawg this budget really shows how privileged y'all are wtf man, i save way more of my money, wtf you dropping $60 a month on in subscriptions bruh? $70 a month for a haircut, wtf???? Supplements? You got a disease or smthn???

 
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That’s a lot to spend without even considering rent. A lot of those seem reasonable except for the bottom four plus dinners. If you’re trying to trim back, that’s where the excess is. 
 

I never did the spend the salary, bank the bonus thing. Every year, I roughly use the first paycheck of the month on rent / expenses and save the second. I think it’s good to treat yourself and do things to keep you sane. But that doesn’t have to mean balling out on very expensive dinners all the time. It blew my mind when a VP told me he spent 100k in a year on Ubers and dinner alone…

 

That's a lot to spend without even considering rent. A lot of those seem reasonable except for the bottom four plus dinners. If you're trying to trim back, that's where the excess is. 
 

I never did the spend the salary, bank the bonus thing. Every year, I roughly use the first paycheck of the month on rent / expenses and save the second. I think it's good to treat yourself and do things to keep you sane. But that doesn't have to mean balling out on very expensive dinners all the time. It blew my mind when a VP told me he spent 100k in a year on Ubers and dinner alone…

This is BS. You have to assume he went out every Friday and Saturday without fail and spent $1,000 every day. Not possible 

 

I agree that there might be a little "rounding up" on the part of the VP, but I think 100k (or close to it) is very much possible. If you assume they eat alone (or just with SO) and take UberX, sure, 100K is tough to believe. But you throw in Uber Black and a couple friends (and the extra bottles of wine that come with that) I think 100K becomes much, much more likely, maybe even easy. 

 

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