February Monthly Low-Spend Recap

 I was hesitant to write up another monthly spending review; it may get repetitive as the year goes on. Remarkably, my February expenses were very similar to my January expenses, proportionally speaking.


The main difference was the $800 deposit I put on a fall vacation with my husband. We'll be traveling from Berlin, Germany to Budapest, Hungary by train and stopping several times along the way. We booked with Intrepid Travel, as that company was recommended by several of my coworkers. This vacation package is pretty basic and only includes hotels along the route (which include free breakfast), rail tickets, and a few orientation walks upon our arrival in each city. I wasn't sure whether or not to include this expense in my monthly spending recap, but I decided to leave it in. At the end of the year, I will add up all of my travel related expenses to get a feel for how much I spend on that category.



It is remarkable to me how similar the expenses are compared to January's expenditure. Overall, I am happy with our spending in February. Including our home improvement expense, which I'll get into below, we spent 49% of our monthly income in February 2025. The figure is lower than I expected because my annual bonus arrived this month.


There was one more expense in February that I elected not to include in the summary above. Every year, we tend to tackle a larger home improvement project. For example, we insulated the house, added vinyl siding, and replaced our gutters in 2021. In 2024, we repaved our driveway. This year, we got a new hot water heater as the heating coil on our elderly boiler is kaput. It had previously heated hot water on demand but we've been living with cold showers since about November of last year! We finally caved and paid $3,913 for the appliance and its installation. I thought the price was a little high, but it is an oil-powered hot water heater (which is more costly than an electric one) and the installation involved installing a lot of new copper pipes, which are not cheap. I'll include this home improvement as a line item in my year-end summary.

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