Just looking at your numbers, I think you are doing pretty well. I don't live on the east coast (I'm in AZ) but it seams like you are spending "normal amounts" on normal things.
I am a SAHM and my husband works a city job so we always end the month with little or nothing. We do not have cable or cellphones (internet and landline are $60) and I shop at 4 different stores a week to buy food cheaper (family of 5, $150-200 max). We have two older paid off cars.
I know we live minimally right now, and will continue to until I go back to work. I know some people think you should cut back your spending if you don't have a huge emergency fund, but I have no idea where we would cut back and I think that is the case for a lot of people. If I did work, we would still break barely even since daycare for my 3 kids would negate any cashflow I bring in. :)
Health insurance comes out of husband's paycheck every other week, so not sure how much that is per month. We don't consider it in our budget, as we don't pay a bill for it each month.
We have very few bills, as most of ours have gotten paid off thanks to my husbands saving-savvy as a young guy. Every penny we have leftover at the end of the month goes towards building our new home. We currently have one sink, one toilet, and our tub is on cinder-blocks. We have a LOT to get done and each paycheck goes towards the house.
Your bills look about right except for:
Electricity - yikes. Expensive! At the hottest part of the year here in Texas we spend only $260 tops. In the fall, when we rarely use the a/c or heater, our electric bill is more like $50.
Cable - can you not get bunny ears? We pay $0 for our cable. We use hulu, netflix, and dvds. When we lived elsewhere, we used bunny ears and got almost all the channels (pbs, nbc, cbs, fox, etc).
Water - cheap. Nice :)
Mortgage - your house must be nice!
Gas - gasoline? We spend $550 a month for ours. Yours sounds great.
This was a great conversation starter with my husband, since he does most of the budgeting.
For a family of three, here's our numbers.
$300 health insurance(not sure, automatically deducted)
$100 car insurance
? Homeowners insurance
$300 property tax
$257 car payment(other car is paid off)
$100 ($150 max-$40 minimum) electricity
$110 cable/internet
$30 water
$16 natural gas
$18 per year prepaid cellphones
$100 per year home phone
$600 home equity loan(we put in $3000 per month to pay ahead)
$140 gasoline
$500 food
20% of his pay to 401K
Also in Texas we have no state income tax.
Health insurance, electric and your cable look high to me. Also, you could save on food (lots of coupons, buying on sale, stores like Aldi). I have the same issues though.
You could try hulu.com and netflix or amazon.com for TV and movies, then the electric should go down if you buy a few fans to use during the summer. Also, health insurance may just depend on your employer, but often there are different options. Maybe you could look at the other rates and try downgrading some.
Car insurance is often negotiable. If you call a few places and maybe take an online driver's training course a lot of companies will give you a discount.
There's a program called mint that you can use to monitor monthly expenses. It supposedly helps with savings...
I live in an area not to far away. People are amazed at our utility bills here in the D.C. metro area. I just switched to a lower rate. We hope to find a way to put solar panels on our home.
We cut out cable long ago after kids. We do have a landline, for many reasons.
We shop at thrift for most of our clothes.
Our food budget varies; as we have a garden, but mostly buy organic.
We rarely get to save and are trying to still cut as much as possible.
For the most part it seems like your prices are right on. You may be able to get your car insurance and cable down, but only like $20 bucks a month.
Keep an eye on all the 'little things' that you buy throughout the month.... I think that's where a lot of us lose money without really noticing. But it all adds up.
Good Luck!
KATIE
I live in VA and this sounds pretty comparable to what we spend.
Looking over your expenses, they seem pretty reasonable. Your food bill is cheap, your car payments are low. I would say the only things you can do for more money is 1. make more (obviously) - get a better paying job or a 2nd job and 2. cut out cable and any other small expenses you could possibly skip. The only other option would be to pay off your cars but w/out extra $ I can't see how unless you sell them and buy cheaper vehicles you could pay for outright.
we have insurance through my husbands work and pay about 120 a month. our car insurance is 300 every 6 months. we dont have a car payment and our water is about 40 a month oh and our mortgage is 850 the rest is probably the same.
Sadly not enough. Only about 200 dollars left over. We are the the DC metro area and it is a high cost of living area. I work full time, and my husband is a stay at home dad. Having no daycare bill is huge for us, but it's still not enough. Your expenses seem very reasonable to me.