Consultant | My budget & planning for the future | Part 3 | Khan Academy TRACY KOCZELA: I'm Tracy Koczela. I'm 24 years old. I'm an associate at a management consulting firm, and I make $89,000 a year. For me, the hardest thing I think financially was moving to New York and figuring out how much I could pay for rent and make sure that I was still saving a little money left over. But I've been working since sixth grade, babysitting, and so, I've always had a little bit of money in a checking account and a savings account, and I worked all throughout high school and I had jobs in college. So, I was fortunate enough to have a little bit of money in my bank account before moving to New York. New York is really, really expensive and there's always a new restaurant to try or a new shop you walk past and you have to have those pair of shoes or something. And so, I definitely could be saving a lot more money if I could, or if I didn't live in New York, but I think it's such a great place to live. I'm definitely having so much fun living here. There's so many interesting people. I wouldn't trade it. And so, I said a few years ago that I wanted to own property by the time I was 30. I'm definitely not on track to save that kind of money for a down payment. And so, that would be sort of, that's my only financial goal right now, is to be able to have enough money in my savings account so that I can afford to purchase a home or a condo in New York. But I'd have to change some things about my lifestyle or get a raise or a new job or something that would have a little bit higher pay, so I could save a little more money. Fortunately enough, my parents had college savings accounts set up for me, and so, they paid for the majority of my college, and I had only $20,000 in student loans that were sponsored by the government. And so, I didn't have to pay any interest while I was still in college. They didn't start accruing interest until about six months after I graduated, when I started paying them back. And so, I'm paying those back now. They're at such a low interest rate, that I'm not too worried about them. If I get a bonus or a big, or if I get a lot of money back from my taxes, I might put that lump sum towards my student loans. But right now, I just pay the monthly payments. So, I use an app to automatically track my expenses, and so, I can look in and see the trends of how much I'm spending at restaurants or on clothes, so I don't constrain myself to a budget every month, but I'm alerted if I'm over budget or I'm spiking a little too high in one area or another. And so, I do look into that pretty frequently so I know where I am for the month. If maybe the holidays are coming up, I expect I'm gonna spend more on gifts. So, the months around the holidays, I'll try and tone it down a little bit on my personal shopping. I make $89,000 a year, and monthly pre-tax, that's $7,417, and then I pay a lot for New York City and New York State tax. I have health insurance through work, a 401K, and an HSA, which is a health savings account, so I can put pre-tax dollars into this account that I can use at doctor's appointments or at CVS, to help pay for some of those costs. And my firm matches some of my contributions of what I put into there. I also have commuter benefits that come out pre-tax. So my take home is about $4,667 every month. I pay $1,570 in rent. And so, I'm sharing an apartment with two other roommates, so there's three of us. We had a two bedroom that we had to put a wall up in the living room for the third bedroom. And so, it's a little tight in there. But the other two are also consultants, and so, we're never in the apartment. We've joked about Air B&B it, but it gets a little complicated. And I'm actually moving to a studio pretty soon, so my rent will increase. I pay $35 a month in gas and electric. About $26 for Internet. We are not home enough to have cable, or we just watch Netflix. Fortunately, my phone is paid for by work. And so, I'm always streaming some sort of video and I don't worry about it, which is really, really, really nice because that adds up. And then, I don't have a car because I live in New York. I don't need one and my commuting comes out of my pre-tax dollars. I pay $110 every month for my student loan, and about $550 for food. I travel Monday through Thursday, and so, all my expenses are paid for. Coffee, food, snacks, everything. So, I don't have to pay a ton in food when I'm back in New York. I pay $25 a month for the gym around the corner, which is super cheap, and I just started getting the New York Times weekend delivery, and that's $20 a month. I save a little money for travel. And so, about $200 a month I'll spend on different travel. $600 for shopping, clothes, home goods, gifts. About $100 a month for personal care. There's a great nail salon around the corner that I go to a lot, or to get my hair cut. And then about $100 for other various expenses. So left over, I have $1,331, which I put $460 of that into a Roth IRA account, to max out the yearly $5,500 contribution. And the rest, I have around $871 leftover that I put into a high yield savings account. I'm definitely spending most of my money. I want to have enough put in a savings account that if I were to lose my job or quit my job, I could still afford rent every month and food and different expenses. And so, it's good to have about three to six months of your expenses in a savings account that you can access quickly. Then the rest I'm putting into a Roth IRA for retirement. And would love to invest the rest of it in the stock market, but I haven't figured that out quite yet.