How I’m Budgeting Less, But Saving More: Final Update!

August 18, 2025

Hello and welcome to The Financial Diet's weekly newsletter!

We'll be in your inbox every Monday sharing our best tips to keep your money, career, and life in order.

ICYMI: We’re so excited to release our 4-part Sex and the City podcast, $40,000 On Shoes, on our YouTube channel thanks to our partners at Monarch! This series was originally published for members back in 2024, and now that And Just Like That… has taken its final bow, we thought it would be an ideal time to revisit the original run — and all of our money-related thoughts that came along with it. Check out the Samantha Jones episode here!

Make sure to read through the entire newsletter so you don't miss anything! Thank you for being a part of this special little corner of our community!

❤️ TFD

By Holly Trantham

This post is part of my personal, honest account of trying out our sponsor, Monarch. Click here and get 50% off your annual plan with code TFD50

As I am writing this final update, it is Friday, August 1st. Our families have all left after our baby shower last weekend, and as much fun as it was to have them in town/in our apartment, it has been lovely to have the apartment to ourselves again. We’re looking ahead to (hopefully) about six weeks of just-us time before the baby comes, which I’m thrilled for — especially because it’ll be way easier to keep our spending in check. To that end, it’s time to update you guys on the outcome of my flexible-budgeting challenge for July!

ICYMI, I’m currently documenting my July budget as I test out the Monarch app after many years of being a spreadsheet-first budgeter. Read through the first two installments in full here and here, but here’s a quick recap:

• I’m spearheading this challenge, but my husband, Peter, and I combine our finances, so the budget numbers include spending across all of our accounts.

• While we’re so excited to become parents, we’ve also had several months of overwhelming/first-time/one-off expenses, and we really need to rein it in in order to start preparing for the expected (and unexpected) expenses of parenthood. Top priority: building a big cushion before we have to start paying for infant daycare in early 2026.

• I decided to put us on the Monarch app to track our spending, but use the “flexible budget” option rather than tracking specific categories — especially since this month was going to include such lopsided spending as our last big vacation before the baby, as well as hosting many family members coming to town for our baby shower. 

• Monarch helped me figure out that as long as we keep our flexible spending to less than $4,400 for the month of July, we’ll be able to put away an extra $1,500 towards those impending-child expenses. 

• In order to achieve this with some potentially spendy events happening, we decided to basically cut out our personal “allowances” for the month, as well as any non-vacation/non-family-visiting restaurant spending.

When I last checked in, we had $1152 left of our flexible budget. This does sound like quite a lot to last us for the last week and a half of the month, but we were looking ahead towards a long and spending-heavy weekend with our families in town. 

Naturally, the day most of our family arrived, our building started having main line plumbing issues, wherein our basement toilet seemed to be the first line of defense. With no available working toilets until a plumber finally fixed the problem around 8pm, we ended up having to send family members (and ourselves) to and from the various coffee shops in the neighborhood, adding about $70 of unplanned coffee-shop spending to the pile for the weekend. 

Otherwise, our biggest spending of the weekend included:

• $270 on takeout pizza and salads (from the fancy neighborhood pizza place) for 15 people 

• $150 on wine and liquor 

• $400 on groceries for ~5 days of hosting, including non-alcoholic beverage options (and keeping in mind we got a lot of extra snacks in preparation for hosting a toddler in our apartment for the first time, as currently non-parents who have no idea what kids eat)

• $150 on multiple Ubers (mainly home from a dinner my parents treated us too and cars to/from the baby shower venue)

As of July 29th, our flexible spending looked like this:

The good news: our electricity bill came in $75 under what I budgeted for! It’s not a fixed cost since it does fluctuate, but since it’s not a part of our discretionary budget, I still marked it as a fixed category. That means that even though the app showed we were $120 over budget, we were actually only $45 over budget for the month at this point. All told, it looked like that extra “emergency” coffee shop spending was what ultimately put us over the limit.

Of course, we still had two and a half days of July to get through, and a relatively depleted fridge to live off of (minus several meals’ worth of leftover pizza that we apparently egregiously over-ordered). We still had to spend some money on one grocery run to get us through those last days. I adjusted our fixed budget categories to more accurately reflect our electric bill/subsequent available flex spending, and our final updated budget for the month looked like this:

We ended up being about $75 over our flex spending budget, meaning I was able to contribute over $1400 to our “impending child fund” goal for the month — just a bit off from my initial goal of $1500! 

Overall, I really liked using the flexible spending feature on Monarch to meet this goal, but I also know that we would probably adjust how we use it going forward. For one thing, this worked because we both agreed to a no-spend month on our personal allowances, and a low-spend month on restaurant spending (which we successfully stuck to outside of our vacation and family visiting). I think using the flex feature made it less stressful to stick to those adjusted habits and keep track of our standings, but being able to save this much still depended very much on adjusting those habits to begin with. 

Since we combine our finances and spending, I think it’s important to have separate “allowances” for personal spending for most months. This is both so we have a feeling of spending autonomy, and so we don’t negatively impact the rest of the budget by accidentally going overboard on personal spending/lessening the combined pot overall. I’m definitely planning to use Monarch to create fixed personal-spending categories and a flexible “everything combined” category!

And now that we’re less than a month out from our due date, I know that our budget and how we track our spending is going to shift significantly in the coming months. I’ll be sure to share the impact of those changes with all of you here (after my maternity leave, at least)!

Download Monarch and use code TFD50 for 50% off your first year. Hundreds of TFD community members use and love Monarch. Click here to get started!

August 20th: Join Amanda Holden, investing expert and friend of TFD, for Ethical Investing on 8/20 at 6:30pm ET. Learn how to invest more ethically — without needing a finance degree or a moral purity test. Amanda will cover what “ethical investing” actually means (and what it doesn’t), how to evaluate funds, platforms, and portfolios, the role of banks, fintech, and public policy in your money choices, easy, concrete swaps to start aligning your investments with your values, how to build a strategy that considers your financial well-being and the bigger picture

Come with your questions. Leave with a plan. Ethical investing isn’t about perfection. It’s about agency, transparency, and doing the best you can within a broken system — while still building the life you want. Join The Society Premium for access.

September 24th: Join us 9/24 for our next FREE masterclass, Rewiring Your Money Brain! There are a lot of misconceptions surrounding what makes someone good with money, and it’s especially confusing when you’re just starting out in the real world. In this workshop, we’ll tackle the biggest myths surrounding credit and budgeting, share our best practices for how to start investing strategically, and how to actually start thinking long-term (without sabotaging your life in the short term). Join us in partnership with Fizz to get a better handle on your money. Click here to register!

^{While this section includes products and services from our paid partners, we only feature brands we genuinely like and use—and think you would, too.}

BUDGETING — Monarch: Our recommended Mint replacement! As we already shared in the main section of this newsletter, we highly recommend using Monarch to take the guesswork out of managing your money — use it to budget, set goals, and actually understand where your money’s going. Even better: there’s no ads, no selling your financial data to third parties, and no "premium only" upsells — just a clean, secure app that makes managing money feel way less overwhelming (and actually kinda fun?).

FINANCIAL ADVISORY — Advisor.com: Dozens of people in the TFD community already trust and use Advisor! They’re one of the only financial advisory companies offering their services for a fixed, flat annual fee. Their team of advisors work for you, not commissions, and help you to achieve your financial goals through planning, investing, and more, no matter where you’re starting from.

INVESTING — Betterment: If you’ve been wanting to start investing but feel overwhelmed by where to begin, Betterment makes it super simple—even if you’re not a financial expert. With automated investing and goal-based planning tools, they’ll help you grow your money responsibly and sustainably over time. It’s a great option if you want to take control of your financial future without having to become a full-time market expert.

DIGITAL SAFETY — Aura: Aura is the simplest way to keep yourself, and your money, safe online. Aura is a digital safety solution to help keep you safe from identity theft, financial fraud, and online threats. Protect your privacy and secure your data across sites, apps, and devices — so you can enjoy the internet worry-free. Aura has up to 250X faster fraud alerts than the competition and all subscription plans are backed with $1,000,000 in identity theft insurance.

The Society at TFD is our members-only community with access available on both YouTube and Patreon. Joining The Society is the best way to directly support TFD! The Society offers the exact same things on both platforms, so choose whichever one you prefer!

We offer 3 tier options:

The Society at TFD Lite: $2.99/month

• Monthly office hours with Chelsea to chat and get your personal questions answered

• Access to our monthly book club hosted by TFD Creative Director, Holly

• Illustrated tech backgrounds every month

• Access to Society Discord

The Society at TFD: $4.99/month — includes everything in the $2.99 tier plus:

• Monthly ad-free extended director's cut videos from Chelsea

• Exclusive members-only events and workshops

• Complete post archive (including exclusive members-only videos of Chelsea ranting on different topics)

The Society Premium: $9.99/month — includes everything from the previous tiers plus:

• Weekly newsletter from Chelsea

• Monthly multi-page workbook/guidebook on a different topic each month

• Members-only capsule podcasts