[OC] Budget 2025 als 26F in VHCOL (in USD)

$36 a week on groceries? How?

How are you paying so little in rent?

I’m curious why you have savings and investments while not maxing the 401k contribution of $23,500. Not to say you shouldn’t be padding savings, but at a point savings is enough to protect between jobs. The rest would be better tax advantaged in the 401k.
3 months savings is $26,500 of your salary before tax which is right about where savings are. After tax it’s plenty.

There are more nuances but without more info I think this is the best course of action. I’m also not offering tax advice. I’m just pointing out what others have recommended to look into.

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Holy shit. 50% savings at that level of salary in VHCOL area? You are amazing. The future you will thank you for being so responsible. But I worry whether this is sustainable. One thing I might point out though is it doesn’t look like you are currently taking full advantage of tax advantaged accounts. I would reduce your savings + investments, and put that money towards maxing out your 401k, and to start Roth IRA.

Id be curious what your dating life is like and if you exclusively split. Decade older, but most of my dating was around late 20s. Was the guy friend among a lot of women; it used to be a pretty stark difference how much I paid per month vs how much they paid, especially considering I went on way fewer dates per month. When it came time for relationships, the number actually balanced out and we were often all pretty close spending-wise.

What are your investments outside of 401k?

if this is VHCOL, then i live in mega VHCOL as those numbers are truly close to impossible where i live (san francisco)

Clean visualization, the Sankey makes the tradeoffs very obvious. What stood out to me is how disciplined the savings rate is relative to gross, especially in a VHCOL context. Breaking taxes and needs together is honest too, a lot of budgets hide that pain point. I would be curious how stable this looks month to month, or if bonuses or irregular income create big swings. Either way, no car and no debt is doing a lot of quiet work here.

Ok, I’m Danish and earn roughly the same, well a little more, but our taxes are a lot higher, so that roughly makes up the gap.

I live insanely cheap in a Co-op apartment, so we spend roughly the same on apartment including water, heat and electricity.

But groceries including eating out, how? I spend about $1500 a month on that, yes it could be cheaper, but not that much cheaper unless I lived on a stone.

Crazy how low taxes are in the US. In most European countries you would be paying at the very least 10k more in tax on that salary.

Our budget is so different.

We spend far more on travel, groceries, dining out, transportation and entertainment!

Far less on living expenses and savings.

Great job being so disciplined!

I’ve seen many of these budget things, what are people using to create these?

This is fantastic! I actually had a similar structure and outcome this year. My food diet is about the same as yours and I fully credit it to vegetarian/flexitarian/pescatarian dieting.