Education resource specialist: My budget and planning for the future

My name is Brechael Walker. I'm 31-years-old and I'm an Education Resource Specialist. I'm currently making $70,000 and I'm in my sixth year of teaching. I started making $48,000, that was my initial salary in my first year of teaching. So I've had a influx in salary over the past six years. To date, I feel very secure and confident in our finances. Maybe five years ago, not so much. (laughs) Because I was just starting out in my career. But right now, I feel very confident in our finances and savings. So I graduated with my Bachelors Degree from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. And I was fortunate enough to have my parents help me pay for, or completely pay for my undergrad degree. And so when I pursued a graduate degree from Loyola Marymount University I took out school loans. To the tune of about $20,000 a year. Because I wasn't working at the time. And I did pursue student teaching while I was in graduate school. And so during that time the $60,000 overall I started making payments six months after I graduated. And so to date, I have $37,000 that I owe on my school loans. There's also a Teacher Loan Forgiveness Program if you make 120 payments which is about 10 years of payments, on your school loans you can, oh, and you're working for five consecutive years as a teacher, within an at-risk school setting, you can get some, or part of your loans paid off. So that's a great advantage to also working in the education space, as well. Currently I'm making $70,000. And, on a monthly basis I am making $5,800. But I'm bringing home $4,300 of that a month. And I'm paying for my school loans. Right now it's about $350 a month. I have collectively $37,000 in school loans that I owe. And then I'm also paying teacher's dues which is about $135 a month. My husband works in the non-profit space for an organization that works in the civil rights space. And he makes $95,000. So collectively, we're making about $165,000 annually. And so with his check and with my check monthly, we have our mortgage, which is about $3,500 a month. We have his school loans, as well which is about $900, or excuse me, $500 a month. We have a child and her diapers and formula and medical needs are about $150, $100 a month. And food and groceries are about $400 a month. And I'm trying to think, utilities are also an expense which is probably about $400 a month. I know our utility, or not our utilities, but our cell phone is about $235 a month. And I think that's kind of give or take where we're at with our finances on a monthly basis. What we try to do is save half of my check a month. So we're probably saving about $2,100, $2,200 a month. And so we try to either save my whole check or save half of it and exclusively live off of my husband's check. So that we're saving, because saving is so important. If I get sick or if the baby's needs come into play then we also need savings, no matter what. We were saving before our baby but we haven't started saving for her college fund. And things of that sort just yet. But I know that's something in the future that we need to work on. My family has always invested in real estate. And so there seeing it as a child and to my adulthood I always knew I wanted to invest in real estate. So, when we got married our parents helped us in buying an apartment building, a five unit apartment building in Los Angeles. And so with that, my husband and I manage the apartment building. And collect the rents and we're able to, that's a part of our savings, as well. Monthly. In being able to invest in the real estate, manage the apartment building that we have. The five unit apartment building that we have generates about $3,500 a month. And then what we take home is about $2,000 a month after the mortgage is paid off and after the utilities are paid for. And, with that we're able to pay our mortgage and part of our mortgage and other expenses that occur through managing the apartment building. Yeah, money is really a means to be able to pursue what you want to do in life. And so my husband and I love to travel. We love to eat good food. And, we love to have experiences. So, we want to make sure that we're always on target in saving in order to have some of those life luxuries, such as traveling and having just experiences overall.