March Wrap-up: Continued transition

DannyB

In March we continuied to make the transition to retired life and income/expenses is certainly part of that transition. Just a quick sidenote - Transition is part of making a change. Making the change, once the decision is made, comes rather quickly. One day I was working and receiving a salary and the next day I was retired and no more paychecks. The change has been planned for and all the work of making the decision to make the change has been done and then the day arrived and the change took place. But, making a change and adjusting to the change are two different phases and the first will not be successful until the second is completed - The transition, This is a time that follows any change and the more sinificat the change the more potentially challenging the transition with it's sense of disorientation, awakwardness of learing new habits, longing for the security of the pre-change world… all that kind of stuff. And so, we continue with our transition into our life as retired people. Anyway… I'll get to my March wrap-up…

Income after bills and savings:

• Income: There were no surprises here. We chose again to not take a distribution from our retirement accounts as we still had enough residual income to cover all our expenses and savings goal contributions. Luckily this income was actually received in March so it was included in our March Spending Plan.
• Bills and Subscriptions: I believe I have already mentioned that I made some changes on what goes under "Subscriptions" based on this support article. Now I included fixed recurring expenses that have no repercussions if I don't make a payment other than losing access to a subscription services or a non-profit goes without our contribution for a given month. All subscriptions are discretionary in nature.
• Savings Goals: I made full contributions to all active Savings Goals and had a couple of SG expenses come due in March. Keeping up with making the withdrawl to spend on goal continues to be one of the draw backs of this use of SGs. I look forward to the day when Simplifi will have an Annual Spending Plan modual that will allow us to do with our annual expenses what we now can do with our monthly expenses. I know this is easier said then done, but I have faith in the abilities and genius of our design/development team.

Planned Spending:

• Once again I had to make some adjustments to keep spending covered in one category by taking unused or reducing how much we could spend in other categories. Since this is the third month to do this I made permanent changes to bring this category into alignment with reality.
• I'm making some changes in how my expense categories are set up to match my shift to fixed and flexible organization. Most of our expense categories will fall under 8 top categores. This reorganization shouldn't affect my Planned Spending set up too much if at all but I'll be monitoring it.

Other Spending:

No "Other spending" for March 😃

That's it for March, now on to April! April will be the first month with all our retirement income streams in place. We will see how it goes.