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Well, it’s that time of year again, when work takes over almost all my waking hours for about a month and I have almost no energy left for anything else. Highlights for this month included getting a stand mixer for my kitchen (more baked goodies = less depressing work environment), completing my tax return (first year filing with self-employment income) and receiving a fat refund (thanks to January’s strategic tax move), and losing enough money in the market to offset almost all of my savings for the month....

January was a really strange month. I deliberately overpaid over $6k in federal income taxes on a credit card in order to trigger a 25k mile spending bonus and set myself up for another 25k mile bonus in another month or two. Since it’s just about tax season, I’ll be getting almost all of that back as a refund in a month or two, minus the 1.87% credit card fee. Totally worth it for the extra travel I’ll get from it....

Pretty good overall for the month, considering the accelerated spending I did on travel. I bought about $950 worth of hotels.com gift cards, some at a 15% discount, and some to earn 10x Chase points during the Chase Pay Best Buy promotion. I value the 8,000 points I earned from that at about $136, so not a bad return on investment there.

Another month gone! Maybe it’s just the season, but time really seems to be flying by lately. Been very busy at work so the days and weeks have started to blur together. Nothing super exciting to report out for this month, other than the stock markets continuing their great performance for the year. It’s weird having months where capital appreciation is actually more than how much I spent during that month....

Had some extra spending this month on travel due to my sister visiting me for a weekend, as well as purchasing plane tickets and airport parking for my annual trip to visit family. I paid cash for 2 of the 3 flights because I found a good deal on one of them and the second one wasn’t really expensive enough to justify using points, as well as the lack of seat availability since it was the holiday season....

Not a whole lot particularly stands out this month in my spending. The only real thing of note is the somewhat higher travel spending. This was partly due to taking a weekend trip to Minneapolis for the GoCurryCracker FI meetup. I spent about $100 on the roundtrip flight and used points for hotels rooms, so the trip itself was fairly cheap. While I’m traveling, I also include any restaurant spending in the travel because I consider restaurants to be part of the trip, and because I rarely eat at restaurants when not traveling, I want to track them separately....

This month was an interesting one because I spent about half of it away on work training. As a result, much of my normal expenses were reduced because the company was paying for my lodging and food. Well, technically I paid for it and I will be reimbursed sometime next month. No complaints from me because I still get to collect all the points and miles that come along with travel spending at no cost!...

This month was pretty stressful at work. A lot of emergent work, and therefore emergent overtime. But the market is still chugging along, so no complaints from me. 

Crossed the $150k milestone this month. Was travelling for the first half of the month, so some of my ordinary expenses dropped while some my discretionaries went up. All in all, a pretty average month as far as spending goes.