Environmental specialist: My budget and planning for the future

My name is Ainsley Smith, I'm 30, I am an environmental specialist contracted to NOAA the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and I make about $59,000 a year. My financial relationship has been a bit of a roller coaster. I have worked for non-profits, I've worked for state agencies, I have been unemployed, underemployed, full-time employed, I've worked two jobs at once. So I'm finally in a very good place. I feel very comfortable where I am now, and the same goes for my husband. We have been in flux at different times, we've been in flux at the same time, but we are both in stable full-time positions at this point. When I moved to Charleston, my husband had also just gotten there and had just gotten started working for a law firm down there as a project manager, and I was job hunting and trying to figure out what I was going to do next and was offered my position at the aquarium, and they offered me $9.00 an hour, and that was a tough bullet to swallow, and I stuck it out, and in the back of my mind I was just always trying to figure out what's next? We can't get sick, the car can't breakdown, and I was very fortunate to have my family as a support. I knew if anything happened they were there, they had the means to help me out if I was in a pinch or something happened, and I got hired by South Carolina Department of Natural Resources making $10.00 an hour. Which was also not easy. It didn't feel like I was getting ahead at all. I was doing great things and getting great experience, but it was still paycheck to paycheck, and counting numbers, and counting and adding and seeing where was this going to go, and not doing a ton savings, and not putting towards retirement which is frustrating and unnerving, and coming out of grad school it's not what you hoped for. I really just had to wait it out. There's only so many jobs you can apply to, and so much you can do at one time, and I had to get that experience, and I'm so lucky that he was working full-time at the time, and I had him and I had my family if anything happened that I needed to rely on them. It wasn't a position I wanted to be in, but I think it had to happen to get me where I am now and to be stable and secure where I am. Personal fun side, going out doing cool things is definitely the first thing to go. Even now we jut have basic cable, we don't have super fast internet, we don't have Netflix of HBO or anything fancy like that. We're trying to put our money towards our priorities which are saving for retirement and also doing things that we can enjoy now like traveling and enjoying the area where we are once we've been able to save for that. Being a contractor, it's not always guaranteed that your contract will be renewed each year, so it's something always in the forefront of my mind of when is that renewalty, what's coming up, trying to get a feel from supervisors and our contract agency if they think that it'll be renewed again. We're definitely planning for retirement and trying to think about what our future goals are right now, what those look like, if there's a house, if there's a family, what that looks like up here. Glaster has become very expensive in the last few years. It's made a change from a hard fishing, kind of rugged New England town to becoming a very popular tourist and summer destination, and that's great because it brings in new income to the town and revitalization, cute shops and restaurants and new bars, but it's also spiked the rent, and we're not sure if we're going to be here full-time long-term so we haven't bought a house yet. So we've been renting for the last three years, and our rent has gone up. Since the last three years it's gone up about $130, which is not insignificant for us since our salary's have not always reflected that. It's definitely cheaper than being in Boston. Your money will go further for you. Out here people don't, not everyone wants to be on the outskirts and being a full train ride away, but for what I can afford, out here with yard and parking and two bedrooms, and being walking distance to the ocean is what I could get. A tiny little one bedroom in an apartment building in Boston, fighting for a parking space with loud neighbors, and I'd rather be up here. Something that I try to do even throughout school was, they had a program where each disbursement every semester if you made a payment within the first three months of that disbursement, that money would come right off of your principle loan amount instead of just skimming away the interest. So I made that a priority. I made sure I was doing that every time I could to keep the initial balance just chipping down as much as I could instead of just throwing money at the interest that was accumulating. Definitely there were a lot of scholarship opportunities available as an undergrad in my community and organizations that my parents belonged to through the school itself. There were some merit-based and leadership-based scholarships that the school allowed me to apply for. Going through grad school I think a lot of the scholarships were through professional organizations. I did get a scholarship from the aquarium because my master's project was related to the work I had done at the aquarium. Honestly, I think I just Googled scholarships and grad school scholarships, and applied to anything is could. Just, every little bit added up. Right now I'm very fortunate to be debt free. My husband does have about $1,500 left on his school loan, which we are very excited to be so close to being done with, and then he has about $5,000 on his car loan, so we are hoping to have that paid off in the next six months and be completely debt free and just focus on our future. When we first moved in together and started combining our finances, we set up joint checking to pay for rent, and then our bank allows you to set up separate savings accounts that you can name or label for different goals. So we started with an emergency fund right away. We knew that was very important as our employment was varying. We set up a house savings fund, a wedding fund at the time, and then a travel fund because that's something really important to us to be able to have meaningful experiences and travel while we're young and healthy. After we finished paying for our contributions to our wedding, we changed that over into a retirement savings account. We each have an account that's separate from our employers that we can contribute to whenever we're able to. On a monthly basis we try and keep up a set amount, but it does vary if there's extra expenses one month, but typically for a year we'll set out a goal that we want to reach for our emergency fund, or for our house fund based on where we're at, and divide out how much roughly that should account for each month if it's $300 into the emergency fund, or if it's $400 that we should put towards the house if that's where we're at. So we try and evaluate that every year, and see where we're at. I make about $59,000 a year, so each month that works out to be about $4,900. After taxes, what I contribute to my IRA and my health insurance, I take home about $2,800. When I contribute to my IRA, I put in about $460 a month, and my contract agency matches $185 or so of that. So I wanted to make sure I was taking full advantage of that match. So I take home about $2,800 a month. My husband brings home about $2,700 a month, which brings us to $5,500. Our rent is $1,520 a month, and that includes our water bill and our basic cable and internet package. Living in New England, our gas and electric is seasonally dependent, so in the summer it could be $60 when we're not running any heat to over $150 in the winter when it's blizzarding outside. So roughly around $100/$105 a month. Our phone bill is $130 a month. My husband commutes into Boston by train, so his commuter pass is $230 a month. I drive to work. It's only a few miles, so my gas is maybe $150 a month. More if we're doing road trips or going on vacation somewhere, and then our insurance is $100 a month. For student loans, I have paid mine off, and he has a small amount left, so we're putting maybe $300 a month towards his. We cook a lot at home, so our food is probably about $400 a month. We don't have any subscriptions or gym memberships, and we spend maybe $200 a month on entertainment and eating out. So at the end of the month we're left with about $2,700. We put as much of that into our savings as we can. Usually about $2,000, and we divide that into our emergency fund, our house savings fund, different retirement funds that we have outside of work, and then also a travel fund because that's something that's very important to us. One of our financial goals is definitely to have a house and settle down, but it's difficult right now. The housing market in the north shore has skyrocketed in the last few years since we've been here, and it's hard to look at housing prices in other areas in western Massachusetts where my family is, in Pennsylvania where his family is,. In upstate New York where we went to school, you can buy something comparable for a quarter of the price, so we're trying to figure out what the best use of our money is right now.