Fake Budgets

~ Clarissa

This is all utterly fake but can anybody explain what a “car note” is? I never heard of that. It’s clearly not insurance because there’s a separate line for that. Plus, the amount is way too high.

Unknown's avatar

Published by Clarissa

48 thoughts on “Fake Budgets”

  1. \ This is all utterly fake

    As a non-American, can you say what’s fake? Income too low? “Must pay” too high?

    I thought “car note” was a fine for parking a car in the wrong place.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Everything about it looks off. People usually make a budget based on the post-deductions amount. And here we see post-deductions except for one. The food bill is ludicrous for one woman and two kids especially if school snacks are in a separate category. Every expense is at an absolute maximum while child support is almost non-existent. Why is she renting if they must have lived in an owned house before the divorce? If the husband makes what she does, this is a $7,000 monthly income. There’s no chance they were renting that whole time.

      And there’s more. It’s all very unconvincing.

      I’ve never had a parking ticket but I don’t think they can be that high.

      Like

      Reply

      1. \ Why is she renting if they must have lived in an owned house before the divorce?

        Why do you assume they owned a house? Many people in Israel have difficulty to pay rent for a flat with prices we have today, let alone to buy one.

        Besides, ‘owning’ a house may mean owning a huge loan to a bank. After divorce, this bank may have taken the flat / house.

        Or a husband may own a flat \ house.

        Like

        Reply

        1. There’s no situation in which a woman and children move out of the house post-divorce. You can’t evict children. The husband moves out and rents.

          At this level of income, $7,500 or more a month, nobody rents. It makes no sense because a mortgage is the same amount but with a mortgage you are building equity.

          Like

          Reply

  2. I assume “car note” just means a monthly car payment. Note can be a synonym for loan. And how is a $600 month food budget unreasonable??

    And why do you assume that they must have owned a house before they divorced? Lots of people rent for various reasons. Even if she and her husband made 7k a month, the down payment–especially in more expensive states– is often prohibitive. In much of California for instance, a regular single family hone is $750k. Not a fancy home. Just a regular 3 bedroom family home. In that scenario, a 3% down-payment is still around $22k! That’s a lot of money! And even if they live in an area with cheaper housing, down payments are still difficult on young families.

    This budget seems entirely realistic to me. And even if she is making it up, it is still broadly representative of the struggles that many have. People can be responsible, work hard, and still struggle.

    Like

    Reply

    1. “There’s no situation in which a woman and children move out of the house post-divorce”.

      Completely untrue. I am assuming that your don’t interact with divorced people due to your religion? Because what you wrote has no connection to reality. The absolute majority of the time, both the mother and the father move to smaller places post divorce. Divorce is almost always a financial burden for all but the wealthy– especially for whoever is the main caretaker of the children.

      Like

      Reply

    2. “There’s no situation in which a woman and children move out of the house post-divorce.”

      Completely untrue. I am assuming that perhaps due to your religion and conservatism that you don’t interact with divorced people much? Because what you wrote is almost laughably false. The absolute majority of the time, both parents move to smaller homes post divorce. For all but the most wealthy, divorce is a financial burden– especially for whoever (usually the mother) is the primary care giver.

      Like

      Reply

      1. What I was saying is that it never happens that the mother and the children move out while the father stays in the house they jointly owned. That the house gets sold and both exes move out, is, indeed, the norm.

        You do know that I’m divorced, right? 🙂

        Like

        Reply

        1. For people who don’t know, I raised a teenager by myself as a newly divorced recent immigrant in a country where I didn’t speak the primary language. Let’s not start the hardship Olympics because I’ve already taken the gold, the silver and the bronze in the single parent category.

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply

    3. I don’t make any monthly car payments, so I assume this means she leased a new car? A kind of car that requires very expensive repairs already?

      My husband and I have a much higher income, and we’ve never owned new cars. The idea is unthinkable. We bought our cars used off Craigslist. And incidentally, I never had to pay any repair costs on my old clunker in all the time I owned it. I mean, I had to change the windshield wipers but that’s it.

      Of course, you can always find crazy people who have a bizarre relationship with money, leasing new cars while they rent and spending strange amounts in groceries. But leaving that aside, the mention of a single deduction and not all the rest of them shows that this is fake.

      Like

      Reply

    4. I dunno. I just checked over our statement, and we spent $400 at Walmart last month, and no other grocery stores. So that $400 included all our groceries for October, plus any dish soap, laundry detergent, toiletries, batteries, and allergy meds we needed (I’m guessing we stocked up on some of those in September). We are a family of 5– 2 adults, 3 children. So $600 just for food seems rather high to me. But I’m willing to contemplate that grocery prices might vary some depending on where you live– just across the state line, where sales tax applies to groceries, everything is 10% more than here. (shrugs)

      Like

      Reply

  3. Note is definitely referring to a car loan, not a lease. It’s not something that you hear very often these days, but it’s how my grandparents spoke about loans (note on the house, pay the car note, etc.) and I think my father still uses it sometimes. My father is 73 and my grandparents are long dead. I have never heard a younger person use it, but perhaps it is a regional thing.

    I don’t think these numbers look wildly off, but they are all conveniently round numbers and that is obviously fake. I’ve almost never had my pay or my bills be an even $125, $300, $200, etc. My bills are numbers like $104.38 or $256.27 and I would probably put $104 and $256 if I were writing out something like this. I could believe the income has been rounded down to an even $3,000 and lots of the bills have been rounded up to even hundreds to make the leftover look as bad as possible.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Exactly. My car insurance is $89 a month. Of course, I can round it up to $100.

      If it’s a car loan, then can anybody say what the car cost if one pays $300 a month on the loan? It seems extremely high. When they lived together, and each adult had a car, would they be paying $600 monthly? That’s 1/3 of my whole mortgage.

      Like

      Reply

        1. “She’s paying a lot in insurance because the loan company requires her to buy the super-duper insurance that will pay off the loan if the car gets wrecked.”

          Wow, I didn’t even know about that. But that’s because we are not rich enough to take out loans. Those things are ruinous.

          Like

          Reply

  4. “car note” is the monthly payment.
    Referring to (some? all? regular bills as “notes” is, I think primarily older Southern and/or African American usage as in this example (at 1:19 “the car he drives? I pay the note every month”)

    Like

    Reply

  5. Unlikely to be a lease, though it could be I suppose. “Car note” usually refers to the monthly loan payment.

    I’m not as certain that this is fake. I mean, it’s highly unlikely that it’s a document created for the purpose of budgeting, but the numbers could be approximately correct.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  6. My only thought is that this is an incredibly low-rent area if they have three bedrooms and two bathrooms for that amount. The car payment I absolutely believe—those have gone way, way up recently. My parents recently got a new car and said the prices rose dramatically in the past five years. Which means payments have also increased dramatically. However, 300 a month is considered fairly decent for a car payment in my area—right now prices are between 450 and 700 a month, which is insane.

    Like

    Reply

    1. I will never understand why anybody would pay $700 a month for a car when you can get a perfectly good car on Craigslist for $6,000.

      Americans have strange relationships with cars, to put it mildly. You keep hearing about people with $250,000 yearly incomes and zero savings and you wonder how it’s possible. This is how it’s possible.

      I’m still trying to explain to my mother that you don’t go to the grocery store and just buy whatever you see. You decide in advance how much you can spend on groceries this week, take that amount out in cash and stay within it. She and her sisters spent $1,200CAD last month on groceries for the 3 of them. It’s doable, of course, but completely insane for 3 retired ladies, one of whom doesn’t get a pension.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

      1. We go for new because of my mom’s allergies and my smell sensitivities. It’s extremely difficult to find a used car that doesn’t set something off lung or headache wise.

        Like

        Reply

      2. People sometimes get swindled buying used cars. My parents bought a used car (not on craigslist), and the transmission failed pretty quickly, which cost at least $1500 to repair.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

  7. Yeah, the “car note” is a loan. She bought a car she couldn’t afford and makes payments on it, with interest, so in the end she’ll have paid probably 2x what the car was worth. It’s a crap deal. This is why we never buy cars unless we can pay cash up front for them– always used, usually 10+ years old. You can still buy good cars in that range, if you stick with Honda/Toyota smaller vehicles, and don’t buy them during tax return season.

    I’m puzzled by her health insurance costs. We can’t get anything for less than $400/mo for our family, even through my husband’s work (and he works for a dang hospital! You’d think they could do better) and ours has a $5k deductible before they pay out a cent, because we save a little going through a religious healthshare instead. Unfortunately, rates are going up again in January 😦

    Her phone/internet bill is also puzzling. WTF phone service is she using, and does she know about the federal subsidies? We do not pay anything for internet, and it’s not slow or anything. We probably don’t have enough bandwidth for online gaming or netflix, but we can’t afford those anyway so whatever. We have two cell phones through tracfone and together those cost roughly $40/mo because we buy the whole plan a year in advance. Those are flip phones that only do phone calls and text, no internet. That is fine. I don’t know what she is getting with that extra $85/mo– do her kids have smartphones with data plans? She should consider downsizing.

    Rent seems about right. We pay $1300/mo for our 3/1 house. It sucks, but the only way we could have gotten anything cheaper is to live literally in the ghetto– one of those neighborhoods where everybody’s got bars on the windows, people are dealing drugs across the street, you have to get a dog or chase hobos off your porch, and everybody puts the fence around the front of the house, not just the back. If her kids are the same gender, she needs to consider a 2br place next time the lease comes up. We wanted to, since we have all boys, but rental regulations say no more than 2 people per bedroom, even if they are little kids. Landlords take advantage of this to keep people with multiple kids out of their properties, by reclassifying bedrooms as something else– so if you have a 4br house, and you want to make sure nobody with 6 kids moves in, what you do is you take the closets out of two of those bedrooms (a closet is what makes it technically a br), and you rent it out as a 2br/2.5ba with a home office and a “bonus room”.

    Utilities look really high for this time of year. Curious where she lives, what month this was for. For us, baseline utility cost– water, trash, gas, electric– runs about $150, because the weather is nice and we don’t have to heat or cool the place. This keeps the biggest variable- electric- around $70-$80. But it can go as high as $290 in August (just the electric!), even though we set the A/C at 81 nights and 84 days– not enough to be comfortable, just enough to keep the walls from getting moldy. I want to experiment with a dehumidifier next summer, to see if that’s negotiable at all. Some of her high costs might be explained by overuse of HVAC, but also maybe she is on one of those averaging plans where the electric company estimates variable utility costs and averages those out over 12 months so it’s not super-high in the summer (or winter with heating) and super-low in spring and fall. One of the lousy things about rentals is that you can’t really do the high-payoff stuff to get utility costs down, like insulating your attic or installing double-pane windows. Best you can do is put some bubble wrap on the windows and put on new weather stripping.

    If she thinks she can get new coats for 50 bucks she is hallucinating. OTOH, she might be able to thrift them or go to a clothing charity for that. I can usually find them for $10 or less secondhand, if I hunt diligently. If we were truly poor I’d make use of one of the local coat/backpack charities (yes that’s a thing).

    200 on gas is way more than we are spending (with 2 cars!). How long is that commute? And what is she driving, a suburban?

    Car insurance: Ours runs a little over $100/ mo for one vehicle. If she’s paying that much it’s probably because she doesn’t own the car and has to have comprehensive. We just buy our cars used and grubby, we just have PIP, and we drive carefully because insurance won’t replace it if we total it 😉 So not only do you save on the car by buying used, you also save on the insurance!

    So I don’t think this looks fake, tbh. It’s not far off our monthly expenses, and we are living on a very similar income (just with more people).

    Yes, there are a few places she’s spending more than she needs to– internet, phone, possibly utilities (but this is extremely variable depending on what kind of home-heating you have, and what climate you live in), and car expenses (yeesh!). But the margin is not huge.

    Food is a tricky one– checking over month of October… looks like we spent ~$400 on groceries and cleaning supplies for our family of 5. But I don’t have a good sense of whether that’s average or low for us— nailing down that expense report is a current project. A lot depends on the age of her kids– if they’re teenagers the $600 might be realistic. But “childcare” expenses suggest they are younger… So $600 for a family of 3 seems pretty high. Probably a lot of heat-and-eat or fast food stuff in there, and she needs to discover the joys of lentils and rice, and cooking at home more (I know that’s hard when you’re also working FT, just saying). 10# bag of chicken legs, not boneless skinless breasts. And drink water. Always water. Nothing but water. Milk is for cooking. If she’s picking up fast food… that needs to end.

    So yeah, she could probably find a few hundred extra dollars in that budget if she really buckled down. Probably she’s used to living a much more posh lifestyle with a husband’s added income, and it’s going to take some adjustment.

    What she is not being honest about here is the fact that at her income, with 2 kids, she gets a tax return of like $8k. And she can, and should, use that to buy a reliable, ugly, used car that gets better gas mileage than whatever she’s driving. If she could let go of the damn car, even selling it at a loss and still owing something on the car note, she’d be doing better in terms of monthly expenses because let’s face it, if she’s owing $500 in repairs on that thing, it’s not a good car anyway. It’s not new, or it’d have a warranty on it. At least if she owned the junker, she wouldn’t have to pay comprehensive insurance on it. She doesn’t need a minivan or a suburban gas hog, if she’s only got two kids. What she needs is a $5k Civic with flaking paint and a few really noticeable dents (this keeps the price down, compared to the mileage, and also reduces odds of the car being stolen or broken into– it is my preferred car security system). She needs to downgrade her phone service, and sign up for subsidized internet. She definitely qualifies, given size of family and income.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

    1. Thanks methylethyl
      Looking at it from this side of the pond those were the points I thought too, so glad to have someone with US experience weighing in (and also glad to see your comment that families (especially single parent families) shouldn’t be entitled to multiple bathrooms.

      Like

      Reply

      1. Heh. I grew up in a family of 6 with one bathroom, and it was never a hardship. I don’t understand all these people with houses where there are more bathrooms than bedrooms! I hate cleaning bathrooms. Why would I want more of them to clean?

        Like

        Reply

          1. This happened to our family of four one memorable Christmas when I was a teenager (thanks, norovirus) and you just … deal. Be as quick as you can in the bathroom if you know others are in need, hold it in until the bathroom is free, use bowls for vomit if necessary. It was not pleasant but it worked out and, funnily enough, even though all four of us were ill at the same time, we rarely needed the toilet at the exact same moment.

            Like

            Reply

    2. “This is why we never buy cars unless we can pay cash up front for them– always used, usually 10+ years old. You can still buy good cars in that range, if you stick with Honda/Toyota smaller vehicles, and don’t buy them during tax return season.”

      That’s exactly our approach.

      “200 on gas is way more than we are spending (with 2 cars!). How long is that commute? And what is she driving, a suburban?”

      I wondered about that, too.

      “What she is not being honest about here is the fact that at her income, with 2 kids, she gets a tax return of like $8k. And she can, and should, use that to buy a reliable, ugly, used car that gets better gas mileage than whatever she’s driving. If she could let go of the damn car, even selling it at a loss and still owing something on the car note, she’d be doing better in terms of monthly expenses because let’s face it, if she’s owing $500 in repairs on that thing, it’s not a good car anyway. It’s not new, or it’d have a warranty on it. ”

      Thank you. That’s precisely what I’m saying. Very few people are reasonable about cars, nd that creates many problems.

      “A lot depends on the age of her kids– if they’re teenagers the $600 might be realistic. But “childcare” expenses suggest they are younger… So $600 for a family of 3 seems pretty high.”

      That’s what I thought. With two 16- 17-year-old boys, I’d get it. But then, why aren’t they working? These sound like pretty young kids, given the price of the coats. You need to try hard to spend $600 feeding them. I’m sure they aren’t into steak or caviar. My kid eats buttered pasta every day, and that’s not because I’m trying to save on her food but because she doesn’t want much else.

      ” And drink water. Always water. Nothing but water.”

      Totally, 100% with you. It’s not just the money, it’s a health issue. Get your kid to love water from an early age, and you’ve set her for life. Mine doesn’t know what soda is. She never tried it, not once. We don’t buy it, so she’s unaware.

      These are all very reasonable things you are saying.

      Like

      Reply

      1. “You can still buy good cars in that range, if”

        I don’t know aboutnow, but fomerly you needed a mechanic to go with you to look/trouble shoot cars. Often they could spot problems (or value) that weren’t immediately available to us lesser mortals…

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

        2. My husband is very good with cars. And building things. He once built a whole house with his father. He’s also great with electricity and plumbing. He’s also very good with money and getting points for free air travel.

          God, I miss my husband.

          Like

          Reply

      2. These “very reasonable” things are the way we make ends meet, day in and day out, with a family of 5 on a baseline of $3200/mo take-home (sometimes he can score some overtime and we get a couple hundred bucks extra, but overtime’s not always available).

        The only clothes I buy new are socks, underwear, and my husband’s work uniforms and work shoes (Doc Martens are pricey up front, but his current ones are four years old and still holding together, so the amortized cost is quite low!). Everything else is thrift, consignment, or hand-me-downs. Same deal for housewares, furniture.

        We almost never eat out. Once a year, my MIL gives us $100 bucks and makes us promise to go on a date– we go to a restaurant then. That’s pretty much it. We cook at home, and the closest we get to packaged foods is buying frozen empanada wrappers (because I’ve tried, and I can’t make them from scratch!).

        One thing that benefits us hugely is having a large extended family that’s also used to living on a below-average income. We save like squirrels, and we loan each other money at no interest in emergencies (and pay it back!), and when we need something large, we can usually get it free or low-cost by “putting the word out” among relatives and friends and finding somebody who’s got a spare or is about to upgrade.

        We also have a family motor-pool. Between us, our family, my parents, and my two siblings, own 6 vehicles. The one we are driving at any given time has no relation to whose name is on the title. We swap them around according to who currently needs which one– truck, minivan, compact commuter, whatever. This has saved us all a small fortune in registration fees and buying/selling losses. I swap with my brother for 1-2 months every summer when I watch his kid, I swap with my sister when she needs the truck… and pretty soon we will need to take our turn and buy the next car, as my mother’s vehicle is getting older and may fail in the near future. My brother bought the last one, and my parents the one before that, so it’s our turn 😉

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

        1. This sounds like my husband’s family, and it is an amazing resource to have. 🙂

          We spend $110/mo on insurance for one car (my husband’s car is a work car and his job pays that). I could probably call around and get a lower rate…I haven’t changed since we got the car back in 2018. It used to be around $100…for some reason it went up even though we have had no accidents, tickets, claims.

          We always buy our cars at auction or used online. At auction, you have to know a guy who has the dealer permit or what have you and he takes us. We’ve gotten amazing deals. The guy we know charges $100 to attend the auction with him. So he’s making a bit just bringing people to auction, as well as buying cars for his business. It’s ludicrous, especially now, to buy cars from a dealership.

          We are a family of five and I manage to stay around 4-500$ on food. I have to make lists ahead of time and I hate that but currently we have to budget closely. I do have a MIL who cooks for us about 1-2x a week on average as well.

          Our Internet is low-cost and $20/mo. We use streaming services no problem. My stepson complains about gaming when he visits, but he is an adult and only visits one or twice a year, so he has to live with it. When he lived with us and wanted faster internet, he paid the Internet bill (when he was out of highschool with a job). I believe it was around $60/mo iirc

          Our phone bill is about $40/mon for two phones with unlimited calls,texting,internet. Mint mobile. Have to pay for the year to get the price but it’s worth it. Before we were paying $100/mo. Pure insanity

          The woman who made this budget if she’s being truthful needs to look where she can cut costs because she is paying a lot more than she needs to.

          Liked by 2 people

          Reply

          2. Well, if she’s recently divorced, she might simply be used to living a 2-income lifestyle. That’d be a big adjustment. I hope she has some low-income friends who can help her figure it out.

            Like

            Reply

            1. We’ve been with Mint about 1.5 years now and I have no complaints in my neck of the woods (New England), service has been very good. They use T-Mobile towers and were recently bought by T-Mobile so I hope they don’t change too much (as in, go up in cost). You do have to own or purchase a compatible phone, however. They send you a SIM card to put in your phone in order to switch to their network. You can look up compatible phones on their website. Ours were luckily already compatible, but if they weren’t, you can buy a decent smart phone these days for $200 or so, and considering what we were used to paying for service per month, we would’ve bought new phones regardless.

              And apparently I misspoke, it’s not unlimited data a month. Ours is 20 GB of data a month, which I never come near using. If you want unlimited, the price is $30/mon per phone, which would be $60 bill instead of $40.

              Liked by 1 person

              Reply

        2. That’s what has always been hard for me. It’s always being completely alone in everything. It’s nobody’s fault, it’s simply how things worked out.

          Like

          Reply

          1. Yeah, I honestly don’t know how anybody manages it without a network– family’s best of course, but I know some people can still manage it through a church community, or among neighbors and friends and such. You have to work at it though. For us, that’s the difference between being frugal and being really poor. It’s always been there for me, and I’ve put a lot into it. We all gain.

            Like

            Reply

    3. “I’m puzzled by her health insurance costs”

      Thanks for your incredibly informative post, full of reasons why I will probably never live in the US again. It would be an incredible hit in living standards for me… I wasn’t thinking about it but posts like yours remove the possiblity from ‘remote’ to ‘virtually non-existent’….

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

      2. Yes, these are very valuable, thoughtful comments that are providing invaluable information. I wish I knew half of this back when I was poor. Many mistakes were made because I knew nothing.

        Like

        Reply

        1. I learned a lot when I was still young, reading Amy Dacyzyn’s “Tightwad Gazette” compilations at the library, and Joe Dominguez & Vicki Robin’s “Your Money or Your Life” which I treated like Holy Writ– those were game-changers for me. I made charts and kept meticulous records for years, and saved up a very nice springboard fund, while only making about $8k/yr (I was single and could do crazy stuff like that!). For anybody the same age now, I also recommend Dave Ramsey’s books, though that’s mostly geared toward people who need to get out of debt. Sadly, that’s most people I meet these days. Those resources between them are basically everything you need to know to get your spending under control, which is liberating no matter what your income.

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply

    4. Note After making this comment, I re-checked my statements and re-jiggered my grocery costs– and I think $400 is too low. Total spent at Walmart over Oct was more than $800 (they get way too much of my money!), and while that does include many things other than groceries (soap, air filters, batteries, toiletries, car parts…) I’m fairly sure it’s still more than half food expenses, so I’ve likely underestimated. Still, 2 adults and 3 kids.

      This is a project for Nov– keep the receipts and itemize that to see exactly how much is going to which things. There will be bar graphs! (rubs hands in anticipation)

      Like

      Reply

Leave a reply to Anonymous Cancel reply