Earning and Spending in November– Family of 8 in California

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I enjoy budgeting because I love the peace that it brings. Knowing that our needs are covered and that we are working toward our goals greatly reduces my overall stress.

While no one likes expensive budget curve balls, they’re so much less stressful to manage when you’re on top of the day-to-day money management. We had two of these unwelcome expenses come up this month.

We’ve known that one of our bathrooms needed some repairs, but it suddenly got worse. On inspection, my husband had to rip out the entire bathroom and start an emergency remodel. It’s currently completely gutted, down to the studs and the concrete slab. It’s going to take a while before it’s finished. Since this wasn’t a remodel that we had saved up for and planned to do right now, Mike will be doing it himself to save money (though it’s still going to be expensive!)

We also just found out that our homeowner’s insurance with the California FAIR plan is nearly tripling, increasing from $3,300 to $9,600 annually. After all of the fires in California, insurance companies have been dropping (or refusing to renew) most homeowners in our area. The FAIR plan will take anyone, but you have no control over the price. We are, or course, looking into anyway to reduce this cost. That was way more than was in our escrow account, so we’re not sure if the mortgage company will require a lump payment to cover it or if they will just raise our monthly escrow payment (likely both).

While I don’t want to pay for either of this unexpected expenses, I’m grateful that they won’t ruin us. We have an emergency fund if we need it, though I don’t like to use it. Because we budget (and especially since we live on last month’s income) we will be able to weather these storms.

So, after those two downers, here’s what our spending and earning looked like in November 2025.

Spending in November

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 November 1st exactly how much money we had earned and received between October 1 and October 31, so we knew exactly how much we could spend between November 1 and November 30. On November 1st, we start the November budget by taking everything we earned in October and assigning it to our November budget categories.

We can’t see the future, so on the first of November, 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 November 1st guesses dictate what we can and can’t do all during the month. The important thing is to not spend more total in November than we earned in October.

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 November spending for all of our budget categories.

Giving

Tithing – $1,848  We start out the month paying a 10% tithe on our income. Like all of our November spending, our tithing is calculated on what we earned in October. 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.

Christmas Giving – $150 Normally we use our Christmas sinking fund for all things Christmas, including giving, but this year we are doing something that will require all of our saved Christmas funds (and then some), so I made a specific category for holiday giving.

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 $138,747 remaining on our mortgage.

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

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Electricity – $6 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. 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 – $374 We have four vehicles with two adult drivers and two teen drivers. The insurance has not gone up yet with the newest driver (a 16-year-old boy), but starting in December it will be $500 each month.

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 – $0 Our water bill comes every other month. In October I had set aside $250 and in November has planned to do the same, but the whole bill was only $222, so I didn’t have to put any toward water in November after all! I would much rather be pleasantly surprised like this than the other way around!

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 – $280 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. 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. In November, there was a phone accident which resulted in a completely smashed and useless phone. We got a  refurbished Google Pixel as a replacement for $205.

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 – $643 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 – $300 Throughout the month of November, gas here was $4.09 per gallon at the station that we frequent. This is a super low month for gas for us!

Household Misc – $286 This includes our normal toiletries, household things, and subscriptions. I also put some donations for the kids clubs and school activities. Our elementary and middle school doesn’t really do fundraisers, so when they need decorations for a dance or the service club needs specific donations they just make Amazon wishlists and parents purchase the things. It’s WAY better than having kids peddling overpriced wrapping paper and popcorn.

Clothing – $40 – We made just a couple of clothing purchases in November.

Animals – $60 We bought chicken feed and dog 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 – $150 Families were asked to contribute $150 to a cross country trip. Once again, I prefer this to constant fundraisers.

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 $110 on appointments and prescriptions and of course the $71 monthly orthodontic payments for kid number three.  Current category balance is $2,953 

Car Maintenance – $400 added.  In November we didn’t spend anything on cars. Current category balance is $3,370.

Christmas – $200 added. I spent $2,115 on Christmas 2025. The majority of it is going toward something that I can’t tell you about yet! Current category balance is $8.

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 $1,672.

Life Insurance – $244 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. We normally set aside $150 each, but needed to add a little more to cover increased annual premium. We’ll adjust what we set aside each month in the future. Current category balance is $0.

Birthdays & Gifts – $75 added. I spent $60 on a baby gift. Current category balance is $268.

Car Registration & Smog – $50 added. We didn’t spend anything here. Current category balance is $371.

Family Fun Fund – $2,000 added. We spent $87 reserving some more campsites for a Yellowstone trip this summer. We spent $1,418 for something that I can’t tell about yet (it’s in conjunction with the Christmas spending).  Current category balance is $611.

Home Improvement – $3,596 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 only spent $241 on it in November, but unfortunately that will go up very quickly. We were hoping that the “extra” income from October would be going toward our investment property, but instead we need to start funding this category in a hurry. Current category balance is $3,355.

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 $800.

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 $25,000! 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 – $1,781 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, which we did in November (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 $94,504.

Since Mike had some extra income in October from his law firm clients we were hoping to put a chunk of it here since we’ve been dipping into the extra portion pretty regularly, but then the bathroom issue came up, so that’s where the extra money ended up going. We just put enough toward the rental property to not need to use any of the extra.

Income Earned in November- $11,200

The categories above show everything we spent and saved in November, which was using the money we had earned in October. At the same time we were also (of course) earning money during November. At the beginning of December, we set up our budget to allocate spending from this November 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 November, which we will use during December.

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- $0  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 – $873 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.

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

How’s Your Budget Working for YOU!?

That was a lot of words and numbers! Congratulations for making it all the way through our November 2025 family budget update!

Now we would love to hear from you!

Any questions on what or why we spend what we do?

What are your current financial goals?

Do you find that your budget is helping you reach your goals, or is it not working like you wish it was?

Let’s chat in the comments!

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