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Physical therapist: My budget and planning for the future

Newlyweds navigate financial challenges, balancing personal and joint accounts, variable incomes, and monthly expenses. They prioritize saving for a house, managing student loans, and planning for future travels. They use online resources to understand financial independence, 401Ks, and interest rates.

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Video transcript

Some of my money concerns are just being a newlywed. So my husband and I just got married in April. And working on combining our finances as well as saving for our goals for the future. So right now, our goal is to buy a house and that's a little scary. Especially with the housing market that's going on right now in Denver. But also just being a new professional. So still getting my feet underneath me for my income, for paying off some of my student loans. Taking on different loans like having to buy a car. And then as well as just kind of understanding what it means to save at this type of income. So when you're a student, you're getting loans, you're getting dispersals, and it's a little different than when you're an adult and you're starting to have taxes and you're having to think about saving and what that means for you. So when my husband and I got married, there was some decisions we had to make as far as combining our incomes or not. We both decided that it would be good if we kept our own separate accounts and started a joint account that could be used towards household responsibilities that we had to take care of. And I always think back to my grandmother who, when she married my grandfather, was a pharmacist back in the 40's which was amazing. She was one of the first pioneers kind of in Arizona as a pharmacist. And she and her husband, my grandfather, put their money together. And she wanted to go out and go clothes shopping because she needed to buy a new bra. And my grandfather told her no, she couldn't have the money to go buy this piece of clothing and she was so ticked off. She was like, you know what, my money is my money, and we'll work together on paying what's ours responsibility. So, my husband never has told me no for wanting to go buy certain things. But I also think it's a great way to have responsibility for your own needs to have your own personal income. And have your own personal safety net. So my husband and I have a variable income every month. My husband is in medical sales. And has a commission based income. We both have a bonus structure, which can make our monthly income a little bit variable as well. And that's influenced by my productivity as well as his sales overall. After our income and taxes, we pay about 30 to 40% in taxes. Part of our healthcare insurance, social security. Contributions to our 401K. With my 401K, my company can match up to three percent. Looking into our monthly expenses, we have a rent right now which is about $2300 a month. With that we get a three bedroom, two and a half bath in Highland's Ranch which is a little suburb of Denver. For gas and electric we pay about $100, depending on the time of year as well as our activity. Internet and TV we pay about $150. Our phone coverage is about $220 a month. Going into our car, which involves our car payment, our gas and insurance, we're about $700 a month for that. And my husband has to drive a lot for work, and so we have to allocate a little bit more for gas. Which is important for his job. I have a student loan which I pay about $550 a month to pay towards the minimum payments. If we have a little extra left over at the end of the month we try to pay more towards that as well. For food, we pay about $400 a month. We use like food services like Blue Apron to kind of help us to stay on track with not going out to eat so much. And so that kind of helps us to have an idea every month of what we're gonna pay as far as our food expenses. Some of the recurring payments that we have monthly is we have a dog, our little fur baby. And we pay about $48 a month for her pet insurance which has saved us a lot of times as far as if she gets injured or needs to go in for something. So because of that pet insurance I think we save a little bit more if something were to happen to her. As being a physical therapist, I also have to think about how my body is basically part of my job. And I have to keep myself safe, and be able to accommodate if I were to get hurt. So I pay about $50 a month towards my short term disability as well as my accident insurance. Which will help to cover us if I did get hurt or if even my husband got hurt on the job as well. For entertainment, we try to keep this as small as possible. Because we're trying to save for a house. But right now we typically allocate about $300 a month to going out. We have our best friends that we go to play trivia with every Tuesday and so that's kind of something we try to accommodate within our budget once a week. Leftover we have approximately about $1000 that we can either use towards paying off more of the loans, contributing to more of the savings, as well as our aspirations for traveling more. I have a simple IRA, so I spend about $100 a month contributing to that as well. So being a newly married couple, we have obviously these goals that we wanna set out for. And so when we start to look at our budget, we really start to look at how much do we need to be contributing in the timeline that we have to buy a house. So we've been saving for the last year on deciding what type of house we can afford. And so because of that, we have goal of 10% a paycheck to contribute to our savings. We also have goals that we want to accomplish before we start our family. So my husband and I have sat down and we talked about our passions for travel. And we really thought it would be a good idea not only for us as people who love to travel. But for our marriage to take two trips a year. So for our honeymoon we went to Bora Bora, which was just phenomenal. And now because we've had that expectation we need to go explore a little bit more of the world. So because of all these goals that we have, we also have to be, you know, smart with saving our money. So taking the sacrifices to not go out to eat as often or, you know, not having the splurge trips that we want to the mall as much as we want to is something we also have to consider. Going into graduate school and even going into college you kind of have this expectation that you're gonna like be an adult and you're gonna like have an understanding of what it means to be an adult. And you get to this situation and you realize it's really hard to be an adult sometimes. And there were so many things I didn't understand going into college and going into graduate school and going into the workforce. I was really thankful that I did grow up in a household that was very open and honest about communicating our financial situation. So I've always had that approach with my marriage with my husband as we're open and honest with what our monthly income is. With what our financial situation is. If there's something that popped up that we need to take care of. But definitely having to research. Like Googling what financial independence is and like figuring out what a 401K is and understanding what it means to save, truly. To have a savings account and not just, you know, I'm not gonna have enough money to make it through the rest of the week. The internet has saved me so many times when it comes to figuring out this whole adult situation. Having to Google interest rates and like what that means when applying for credit cards. And what it means when you have to sign up for different savings plans with your work and you know hopefully you can surround yourself with people that have a better understanding than you do, which is really important too. And then also having just the skills and the tools to start to research it on your own.