Earning and Spending in December- Family of 8 in California

For over thirteen years I have shared our family finances with you. That’s a long time to be transparent and consistent with budgeting! So much has changed since I first started sharing our income and spending publicly. We have twice as many kids as we did back then. Our income has increased and so have our expenses. We are grateful to no longer have student loans or other non-mortgage debt.

I know many of you have followed along since the beginning! I appreciate your encouragement and support over years! Having this community was so helpful when we were going through the challenge of paying off debt.

Next month I’ll start sharing our budget updates for 2026. I’m thinking of changing the format up a little just for fun. I would love to hear your ideas of what you would like to see or what would make these budget updates more useful to you. In years past I made budget update videos as well, where I showed my YNAB screen as I talked through the month’s expenses. I’m thinking about doing that again. Please let me know what you’d like to see with future budget updates!

Here’s what our spending and earning looked like in December 2025.

Spending in December

When we first understood the concept of living on last month’s income, it rocked our financial world in the best kind of way. If you have no idea what that means, here’s a video walk-through. Or you can read up on how you can get started.

At the beginning of each month, we start budgeting by first adding up the income we earned the month before. We knew on December 1st exactly how much money we had earned and received between November 1 and November 30, so we knew exactly how much we could spend between December 1 and December 31. On December 1st, we start the December budget by taking everything we earned in November and assigning it to our December budget categories.

We can’t see the future, so on the first of December, these dollar assignments are really just our best guesses and goals. We’ve been doing this for years and can make some pretty good guesses, but every month is different. Our dollar assignments at the beginning of the month almost never stay exactly the same because our needs and priorities usually change during a month.

It’s normal for our spending plan to change as we move through the month. The important thing isn’t spending exactly how much we guessed we might spend in each budget area at the beginning of the month. It would be silly to let our December 1st guesses dictate what we can and can’t do all during the month. The important thing is to not spend more total in December than we earned in November.

If we need to spend more in one budget category than we had originally assigned, that money has to come from some other budget category. We revise the budget categories to meet our priorities during the month, but we can’t just add more money to all of them, because the total amount stays the same all month long. A changed budget is not a failed budget. A budget needs to be flexible in order to be successful!

Here’s our family’s final December spending for all of our budget categories.

Giving

Tithing – $1,288 We start out the month paying a 10% tithe on our income. Like all of our December spending, our tithing is calculated on what we earned in November. We often get questions about this. You can read our thoughts on tithing here.

Fast Offering – $100 Each month we take one day to go without food and drink (fasting) and contribute to a program that helps people who need it.

Monthly Bills

Mortgage – $2,453 We are back to paying our actual mortgage bill each month instead of paying extra. We have a 15-year mortgage on our 2200 sq ft house in Northern California. We’re so thankful to have locked in our mortgage interest rate at 2.375% when we refinanced in December of 2020 (details of that here.) We currently have $137,231 remaining on our mortgage.

Here’s our mortgage payoff goal tracker house (you can get your own copy in my shop)!

Electricity – $169 Two years ago we installed solar panels on our property, a $70,000 investment that we finished paying for last year. Our electric bill is just the $6 unavoidable fee for most of the year, but in December we have our “true-up” which is the difference between what we’ve used and what we’ve produced over the year. I am in the process of writing a detailed analysis of whether solar was worth it for us, so look for that soon.

Car Insurance – $502 We have four vehicles with two adult drivers and two teen drivers. The insurance finally went up with the newest driver (a 16-year-old boy).

Internet – $110 We have cable internet through Comcast. When we bought our home eight years ago, we invested $5,000 to have Comcast extend cable internet to our property. It has been worth it every single day since then, even though the cost for internet service went up recently.

Water – $100 Our water bill comes every other month. I try to set aside half of what I expect the bill to be.

Garbage- $60 Like the water bill, our trash pick-up bill comes every other month, so each month we set aside the money for half of the bill. The cost seems to go up several times a year.

Cell Phones – $100 After two years of paying for the cell phones for the Ukrainian family that we sponsor, they are now paying their own cell phone bills, which leaves us with 4 phones in our family. Mike is on the annual plan, so we only pay 3 phone bills per month, though I started putting his $25/month here too so that when his annual plan renews, there will be a chunk here in this category. Our phones are all through Visible. Visible is a Verizon subsidiary that offers no-contract plans with wifi calling, unlimited cell calls, and unlimited data on the Verizon network. We’ve been using them for years. You can’t beat paying just $25 per phone each month with unlimited data.

Gym – $60 For the first time in our lives, we joined a gym this year. Our teenagers were extra excited, since it’s a small local gym that many of their friends go to. We hope that investing in our fitness now will make life better now and for years into the future.

Everyday Expenses

Food – $568 We are a family of 8 including 3 athletic teens. We primarily buy ingredients and cook at home, rather than eating out or buying convenience food. If we do get pizza or anything like that, it goes in this category since we don’t have an “eating out” category in our budget. If you need help getting your grocery spending under control, you can learn all about my strategies and method in my Grocery Budget Hero online course. Right now it’s available with pay-what-you-can pricing!

Fuel – $374 Gas prices are going down. In December they got as low as $3.89.

Household Misc – $286 This includes our normal toiletries, household things, and subscriptions. In December, it also included domain name renewals for several websites that we have, as well as that lost library book that I talked about in my Frugal Feats, Flops, and Funnies post.

Clothing – $344 – We took advantage of some great sales in December to get jeans, dress pants, underwear, socks, and a few other things for those in the family who needed them.

Animals – $30 We bought cat food.

Allowances – $143 We give our six kids “practice money” as a weekly allowance. You can read all about why we decided to pay our kids allowance that’s not directly tied to chores, as well as all the details of when and how much in this blog post.

Sports – $21 We have several kids in sports now, so this is definitely a low spend month for sports.

Sinking Funds

For our regular budget categories above, we take out any funds that are still left at the end of the month and send them toward our big financial goal. For example, if we started the month with $800 in our food budget category, but only used $720 of that, the other $80 would go toward our current major financial goal. Focusing all these extra funds from each category into one goal helped us pay off our law school debt years earlier than we thought possible.

In contrast to the regular budget categories above that we zero out each month, we also put money into the categories below. These are our sinking funds. Our sinking funds are categories where we set aside money for periodic expenses each month and let it roll over and build up until we need it. I recently wrote a whole article about how to get started using sinking funds (and why you should).

The amount in bold is the amount we added to the fund this month, followed by spending notes and the current balance of each fund.

To answer a question we often get, we do not have separate bank accounts for these funds. We had separate accounts many years ago when we first started budgeting but we learned that was overkill. Instead, all of the money sits in our checking account. Since we spend according to our budget category balances, not our checking account balance, we’re not worried about getting the money mixed up. We seriously never even look at our checking account balance unless we’re reconciling the account. We track our budget categories and spending in YNAB, a budgeting tool we absolutely adore. Yes, you can adore a budgeting tool. Don’t believe me? Try it out. If you have been using Credit Karma or something similar to manage your finances, you’ll want to read about our switch to budgeting with YNAB.

Medical/Dental – $500 added. We spent $206 in December between the $71 monthly orthodontic payments for one child, new contacts for another, and co-pays for office visits/MRIs/x-rays. Current category balance is $3,247.

Car Maintenance – $400 added. A cool thing about having auto insurance through USAA is that they share dividends at the end of the year. This year that was $237. I decided to use that to put toward car maintenance this month, so of the $400 contributed to this sinking fund, only $163 came from our regular budget. We didn’t spend anything. Current category balance is $3,770.

Christmas – $204 added. I spent all of our Christmas 2025. The majority of it went toward something that I will be telling you about soon! Current category balance is $0.

Disability Insurance- $190 added We set aside money each month for disability insurance so that when the annual premium is due we have the money ready. If Mike is unable to do his work as an attorney due to illness or injury, this disability insurance will replace about 60% of his current income. Since our income potential is our greatest financial asset right now, we have disability insurance to help us protect it. We paid the balance in March and are now saving for next year. Current category balance is $1,862.

Life Insurance – $125 added. Our life insurance premiums are due each November, so we set aside a portion of the estimated total each month which will go toward next year’s premium. Current category balance is $125.

Birthdays & Gifts – $75 added. I got Mike these for his birthday since he needed some new ones. I also got some clothes for a friend who will be leaving to be a missionary soon but doesn’t have a family to support him. Current category balance is $208.

Car Registration & Smog – $50 added. We paid the $150 registration on one of our vehicles. Current category balance is $270.

Family Fun Fund – $180 added. We spent $109 on an upcoming adventure (more on that soon). Current category balance is $681.

Home Improvement – $1,079 added. We started an emergency bathroom project at the end of November that involved completely gutting our kids/guest bathroom. We haven’t made it very far yet, but it will be a DIY project that we hadn’t planned on or budgeted for. We spent $4,435 on the project in December. It doesn’t actually look much different yet, but we have more supplies and tools than we did before! We have cash flowed the project so far, but we’re definitely far from done spending money on this. Current category balance is $0.

Swim Team 2026 – $100 added. I started a sinking fund to start saving up for swim team next year. It will be nicer to have the money all set aside when the early spring registration rolls around next year rather than having to come up with the ~$1,200 in the month it’s due. Current category balance is $900.

Investing

Kids’ 529s – $150 added. Investing just $25 per child per month for college isn’t much, but we are okay with that. Neither of us had much college savings when we went to college, but with scholarships, grants, loans, and jobs during school we were able to get our undergraduate degrees without debt. We may contribute more later, but right now we’re happy with small, consistent contributions. I looked at the balances recently and was pleased to see that this small contribution that is barely noticeable in our monthly budget has added up and grown to over $26,000! If you want to know more you can read about how we decided to start 529s for our kids.

IRA (Steph) – $583 added. With this same amount each month, I will reach my $7,000 IRA contribution for 2025.

Investment property – $1,000 We recently bought an investment property. Right now we are putting money into it, including paying the mortgage until it gets to the point where it covers its own expenses. The amount listed here is the money that came out of our family budget to go toward the new property. The goal is to meet the $2,339 mortgage payment each month, though we didn’t do that in December (RV rental rent minus expenses also goes toward this).

We financed the purchase with a home equity loan that was larger than the actual purchase price. The extra portion is to cover expenses until the property pays for itself, including some of the eventual cost of putting a permanent home on the property. The extra portion is currently at $93,990. We have the funds sitting in a high yield checking account, so it gets over $300 in interest each month. Though that doesn’t cover the interest we’re paying on the loan, it’s at least something in the time when we don’t have a renter to cover the costs.

Income Earned in December- $14,221

The categories above show everything we spent and saved in December, which was using the money we had earned in November. At the same time we were also (of course) earning money during December. At the beginning of January, we set up our budget to allocate spending from this December income. I’ll share that spending next month.

This concept of getting a month ahead has made such a huge impact on our finances! It takes some work to get to the point where you are living on last month’s income, but the effort is completely worth it!

The income section below shows the money we earned in December, which we will use during January.

Attorney Income – $9,827 Mike works as an attorney for the state of California. This was his take-home pay after taxes, social security, his pension contribution, and health insurance premiums.

Rental Income – $500 We gave up our Airbnb rental to take in a Ukrainian refugee family for the past 2.5 years. In July of this year they started paying us some rent. We loved Airbnb and will likely go back to that in the future. If you’re thinking about renting out your space on Airbnb, check out this post where I describe how we earned far more than we expected with Airbnb.

Law Firm- $2,700 Before working for the state, Mike did estate planning and business transactional work. Over the last few years he has had a steady stream of potential clients, most of whom he refers to other attorneys, but he still occasionally helps former clients. He doesn’t write himself a paycheck each month, just a couple of times a year.

Blog – $0 I only pay myself a few times a year now. My blogging income took a major hit when I put the blog on the back burner during Covid to start homeschooling my kids. It is slowly recovering as I put more effort into posting regularly and all of the things I do behind the scenes. Thankfully the income still covers my fixed blogging expenses (which are a lot more than most people would guess) and allows me to pay myself a few times a year.

Child Care – $1,194 For the past two years I have been taking care of the 3-year-old of the Ukrainian family that we sponsor. There is a community organization that pays for childcare while the mom is at work. It’s much less expensive and more convenient to have her stay with me than to bring her to a standalone child care facility. This is much higher than what I normally get paid because there were some additional payments included for some reason.

Come back next month to see how we used this income to spend and save in January’s budget.