Here’s every dollar we spent in 2025:
Housing – $40,879 total // $3,407 per month // $1,703 pppm¹ (down from $145,281 in 2024, a $104,402 decrease)
As expected, we spent way less this year as most of our renovations wrapped up last year. We did have one delayed bill from the electrician for $6k in January for work done in October/November which should have been in ’24 but snuck into ’25. We also had the exterior of our house painted in October for another $6k.
All other months are our mortgage, taxes, insurance and utilities (water, electric, gas, trash). Those non-renovation months averaged ~$2.4k/month
Cell Phone – $803 total // $67 per month // $33 pppm (up from $456 in 2024, a $347 increase)
My dear wife’s iPhone X (2017-era phone, which she purchased in 2019) finally bit the dust, and she replaced it with a refurbished iPhone 14 from Back Market for $320 in May. She expects to get at least 6 years out of this one as well, if not more.
We still pay ~$10/month each for unlimited talk, text and 2GB of data, provided by our friends at Tello. We pay $19/month for Spotify, which we use frequently and Annie uses to create playlists for her barre classes. I expect 2026 to be super consistent at ~$40 per month.
Groceries – $6,536 total // $545 per month // $272 pppm (up from $6,523 in 2024, a $13 increase)
I had to double check the numbers here because they were so similar, but we indeed spent within $20 of last year’s grocery expenses this year (even though I thought it would go down).
We buy 95%+ organic food, focus on healthy whole ingredients, and make the vast majority of our food at home. Mike’s Discount Foods is our favorite grocery store, and typically has organic baby/toddler food like squeeze pouches for a fraction of what it usually costs. They recently had super fancy Cerebelly brand squeeze pouches, $2 for a 6 pack. We bought a bunch, came home and checked what the price was per 6 pack at Whole Foods – $24… yikes!
Mike’s is joined by Walmart and Aldi as our go-to, inexpensive, organic food stores. I’ll predict that our grocery spending will go up as our little baby continues to eat more and more food.
Dine Out – $1,182 total // $98 per month // $49 pppm (up from $1,072 in 2024, a $110 increase)
Our dining out consists of either date nights, or social activities with friends/family. It tends to increase when we’re traveling, and be less the months we don’t travel as much. This category also gets split into Gifts quite a bit as we try to pay for friends/family most of the time.
We had one Uber Eats order while we were in Denver, and it was $60 for egg rolls, curry and pad thai. It’s always a good reminder why we very infrequently order delivery like that – $60 at Mike’s could be a week’s worth of groceries for our little family of 3.
Travel & Entertainment – $5,643 total // $470 per month // $235 pppm (up from $3,001 in 2024, a $2,642 increase)
We traveled A LOT this year, with baby in tow on every trip. Phoenix, Denver 3x during the year, Dallas, Bradenton, FL, Blue Ridge, GA, South Dakota many times, Kansas City, Bayfield, WI, Duluth, MN. Little dude took 12 flights before he turned 1 year old, and traveled like a champ (otherwise we wouldn’t have kept doing it!). It did make some trips more expensive, as we opted for AirBNBs with cribs/high chairs/baby gear, but not much more than what we would have spent without a child.
Family, friends and weddings were the main reasons for our travels, and given how the calendar looks for the next 12 months I’d say this category is likely to decrease in 2026.
Transportation – $40,537 total // $3,378 per month // $1,689 pppm (up from $1,465 in 2024, a $39,071 increase)
Patty the 2011 Nissan Pathfinder’s airbag light was on, and the mechanic said that the airbags had a 50/50 chance of actually going off in an accident. We decided we’d like to have a car with a closer to 100% chance of correctly operating airbags. After much deliberation and renting one earlier in the year as a test drive, we purchased a used 2024 Tesla Model Y in cash with ~50k miles for ~$32k sticker price in August (+$5k in taxes, delivery fees, registration, etc.).
We could have bought a less fancy, plenty functional car for easily half of that, but we were impressed by the Full Self Driving feature (which drove us to South Dakota and back in May without us touching the steering wheel) and appreciated the fact that it is one of the safest cars on the road. I’m also looking forward to much less maintenance with an electric vehicle (hopefully!).
At the end of the day though, this was a luxury purchase and there’s no sugar coating that. Insurance will be higher going forward, and I will feel much more pain from every dent or ding than we did with Patty. I’ll be interested in the side-by-side ownership cost comparison in a year or two, stay tuned.
ALSO, if you haven’t experienced Full Self Driving in a Tesla, I would love to show you and take you for a ride. It’s incredible technology, and I believe it can make roads safer/save lives.
Gifts – $5,550 total // $462 per month // $231 pppm (up from $2,683 in 2024, a $2,867 increase)
Over 2x last year’s gift spending, which means we’re 2x better humans than last year, right? There was a lot of wedding related gifts/flights/lodging this year, and a lot of paying for family/friend’s meals. We also had quite a few graduation parties to attend this year.
Child #1 – $1,861 total // $155 per month // N/A pppm² (down from $4,749 in 2024, a $2,889 decrease)
This ~$2k consists of one car seat for $250, diapers, clothes, random gear, consumables, and anything else specifically related to the little guy, who turned 1 in November. It does not include most of his groceries (aforementioned squeeze pouches), as those are lumped into the grocery category.
We don’t pay for child care, which is a massive savings. I’ve read a lot about how expensive it is to raise a child (most recent estimates in MN are ~$33k per kid, per year, allegedly) and even with child care included I can’t imagine how folks are getting to that amount of spending.
Other – $12,867 total // $1,072 per month // $536 pppm (up from $8,803 in 2024, a $4,064 increase)
One brand-new $1,800 couch in July, a lot of household goods (curtains, TV, TV console, rugs, new exterior lights, mailbox, etc.) and healthcare costs make up the bulk of this category. We did a good amount of thrifting this year, during which we acquired most of the artwork that is hanging in our home. I’m expecting this category to go down a decent amount in 2026.
TOTAL – $115,857 total // $9,655 per month // $4,827 pppm (down from $174,034 in 2024, a $58,177 decrease)
Decrease from last year came from housing ($104k less) and child spending ($3k less), offset by higher transportation ($39k more), other ($4k more), and gifts ($3k more).
$116k is still a ton of money to spend in a year, and is not indicative of what our yearly spending will be going forward (although I said last year we’d be in the $40-50k range in 2025 so what do I know?). $40k in transportation costs will likely become a few thousand (mostly insurance, charging and FSD subscriptions). Given we’ve upgraded and furnished most of our house by now, housing and other should decrease.
Our 6 lowest spend months of this year average out to be less than $5k/month, and I think that’s closer to a normal amount for us (~$60k/yr), if not less. So I’ll predict that in 2026 we spend between $55-65k total.
Thanks for reading, and if you have any questions, want to know more, or if there is anything I can help with, feel free to send me an email at hashtagmoneygoals@gmail.com. Happy New Year!
1Per person per month (monthly cost divided by number of adults in our household which was 2 for the entire year. Theo doesn’t count yet)
2Since this is all Theo costs, the average is the same as the per-person-per-month cost since it is only one person
Past years reports:
2024 Spending Report
2023 Spending Report
2022 Spending Report
2021 Spending Report
2020 Spending Report
2019 Spending Report
2018 Spending Report
2017 Spending Report