Budgeted 42k, spent just over 50k in year one with no big one-off purchases, no move, no new car. Categories all look slightly higher rather than one obviously blowing out. I tracked everything the same way I did while working so it's not a data problem. Did this happen to anyone else and did it settle down in year two, or is this just what the real number always was?
Check the annual and irregular stuff specifically. In your last working year a lot of people quietly defer things: dentist, car service, replacing the washing machine, the trip to see family. Year one off is when all of that lands at once, and it looks like general inflation across categories because you're paying for a backlog rather than a new habit.
Two dentist visits, a boiler service and a laptop in the first six months, all of which I'd been putting off for years. That's most of the gap right there.
Then year two will look much better and you should still budget an annual amount for the next backlog. There's always one.
Time is the hidden line item. When you had 12 free hours a week you filled them with cheap things because you were exhausted. With 60 free hours you take up hobbies, meet people for lunch, drive places on a Tuesday. None of it looks like extravagance and all of it costs money. I'd count it as the price of the thing you bought rather than a budgeting failure.
Mine went up 15% in year one and 4% in year two, and I stopped worrying once I realised the withdrawal rate implied by the new number was still under what I'd modelled. Worth checking that before you treat it as an emergency, sometimes the budget was just conservative.
One boring possibility: health insurance and out of pocket costs. If you moved off an employer plan, the total cost is easy to underestimate by a few thousand a year even when you did the maths, because deductibles and things not covered aren't a monthly number. Worth pulling that category out separately rather than leaving it inside 'insurance'.
@tessa_ondrak · 3w ago · 3 replies
This is the single most common surprise I hear and it happened to us at almost exactly the same magnitude. The cause is that work was subsidising your life in ways that never appeared in a budget: a subsidised canteen, a phone, a laptop, someone else's heating between 9 and 5, and a commute that kept you out of the shops. Ours settled about 8% above the working-year baseline by year three, not back down to it. The good news is it's a level shift, not a trend.
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@coopvent_cal · 3w ago
The heating one is real, our gas bill is up nearly 40% and I'd never connected it to being in the house all day.
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@tessa_ondrak · 3w ago
It gets everyone. Also daytime electricity, more laundry, more coffee made at home which sounds cheap until you count the beans.
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