My Family Spent $100,000 in the Last 3 Months: Full Budget Breakdown
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Ever wonder what financial advisors actually spend their money on?
This week I'm sharing a full Q1 2026 budget recap covering everything we spent in the first three months of the year.
If you want to know how much we spend to pay down debt, educate our kids, maintain our home, eat, and satisfy our travel bug, this is the episode for you.
Plus, you’ll learn how I track spending (but never keep a budget) as a future inheritor with a net worth over $5 million and family annual income of ~$400,000.
I’m also sharing a full update on our basement renovation, including tips for inheritors who have never renovated a house (but want to in the future)!
This episode is for everyone who thinks they spend too much, too little, or just wants to peek behind the curtain into my financial life.
Because when I promise radical financial honesty, you’re going to get it.
🗓️ Schedule a FREE call to talk more about how I can help you navigate a current or future inheritance.
Transcript:
How Do High-Net-Worth Families Track Spending?
Hey, I'm Katherine and thanks for joining me at Heir Necessities, the podcast that turns complex financial topics into real talk for Gen X, Millennial, and Gen Z inheritors. Each episode of this podcast, I break down a different topic related to generational wealth and inheritance.
My goal is that you can stop trying to figure out how to manage your money by asking Google or ChatGPT what to do and come here instead. For real talk, real solutions, and real advice that you can start implementing in your life today.
On this week's episode of Heir Necessities, I am diving into a quarter one recap of everything that my family spent. This includes an update on our basement renovation project, how much we've spent so far, how's it going, what we've learned in the few short months that we've been doing this, and how much we have left to spend.
Before I dive into the full episode, quick plug: if you are enjoying Heir Necessities, I would appreciate it so much if you could leave the show a five-star review wherever you listen to podcasts. It's super helpful for me and it helps me connect with and help more inheritors just like you.
What Is the Best App for Tracking Family Spending?
Now let's dive into the budget recap. First off, I've got a lot of questions about how we track our spending. I use an app called Monarch Money. They don't sponsor me, although I'm super open to it if y'all wanna reach out.
It's an amazing app to track spending. It's super intuitive, it's super easy to use.
Do You Really Need a Monthly Budget?
And we don't budget in my family, which is to say, at the beginning of the month, I cannot tell you that we are gonna spend less than $800 on groceries. I can tell you that based on past months, we're probably gonna spend $800 to $1,000, but we don't have a hard and fast target that we stick to in any spending category, and that's by design.
We don't have the energy, don't have the interest, and we don't really need to budget strictly in that way. But if I don't track our spending, I start to get nervous and we start to spend more and more and more because you don't actually see that money going out if you're not looking at it every couple of weeks.
How Much Should a High-Income Family Be Saving Each Month?
The first quarter of 2026, we made just under $70,000 and we spent about $46,000.
On the face of it, that seems good. We saved $25,000 over that quarter. But that doesn't really tell the whole story because also the way that I track my spending might not line up exactly with how everyone else does it. And the reason is because when I track my spending, I am focused on understanding what do our costs look like in a given month.
So if there are big one-off costs like tax payments or our basement renovation, I don't capture those in our budget. I look at them in a different place, because I still wanna know they're there, but I don't want them skewing all the numbers, because what I care about is what we're actually spending, what we're averaging out on a month over month basis.
And those big payments, the tax payments, the home renovations, they skew that average. And so I want to put them over to the side where I can still look at them, I can still see them, but I don't have to spend a whole bunch of time thinking, my God, we spent $30,000 this month, everything's going to go crazy, when the reality is, right, we only spent $30,000 because we had to pay our taxes or there was a big bill that came due for the basement renovation.
What Is the Biggest Monthly Expense for Wealthy Families Without a Mortgage?
With that in mind, I'm going to run through our spending in January, February, and March first and then take a look at what's going on in the basement. Our biggest spending category almost every month is debt service.
We don't have a mortgage on our house, which I'm very grateful for. But we did take out around $100,000 when we were finishing our first round of renovations in 2025. We're still working on paying that off.
We pay about $2,000 a month to that loan. I think the balance is around $70,000. My goal is to get it fully paid off in the next year, and then we will be totally debt free, which is really exciting.
We also have a little bit of leftover zero interest credit card debt from our renovation last year that got paid off in March. So total for debt service in the first three months of the year was just around $6,500. More than I wanted to be, definitely, but costs that we took on knowing full well what we were doing and deciding that we needed to make those renovations in 2025 so that we could move forward with this year and our basement renovation that's happening right now.
How Much Does Childcare Cost?
Our next biggest spending category isn't that much lower and it's childcare. So before we even wake up on the first day of the month, we've already committed to $4,000 worth of expenses just with paying off our house debt and making sure that our kids are getting a quality education.
Both of our kids are in preschool right now. I live in Portland, which is in Multnomah County. Multnomah County has a free preschool for all program and our daughter was lucky enough to get a spot.
So right now preschool for her is free, which is amazing because it means we're spending $2,000 a month on childcare instead of $4,000 a month. We are super hopeful that our son is also gonna get a spot in September, which means that in September our childcare payment would go down hugely.
Our daughter's starting kindergarten so we would have to pay a little bit for aftercare for her, but I think that's gonna be around a few hundred bucks a month given our need and we should be able to save almost $2,000 a month. So with our debt being paid off hopefully in the next year, a free preschool for all spot, knock on wood in September, and then our daughter starting school, gonna have an additional $4,000 or so in free cash flow in the next 12 months.
Why Would a High-Income Family Stop Contributing to Retirement Accounts and When Should You Start Again?
That is the goal and it's a really important goal because the biggest piece of all of this that I haven't talked about here on the podcast is that when we bought our house in September of 2024, we all stopped contributing to our retirement accounts. So my husband has a 457 and a 403(b) through his work because he works for the government.
So he can double dip on his 401(k) contributions and contribute almost $50,000 a year into his Roth 401(k) accounts at work. He was doing that and it was amazing because I really want to stuff as much money as we can into those Roth accounts.
It's such an incredible opportunity for us now, given what our income picture will probably look like when we're retired. We turned off all of those retirement contributions when we bought this house because it was so expensive to maintain, to go through the renovation, the business wasn't making as much money as it is now. It was too much.
And then even as money started to come in and the renovation started to wind down, we still had these bigger expenses because this house costs a lot more to maintain than our other house. So the goal is that my husband will get back to making those $4,000 a month retirement contributions starting in September.
How Much Should You Be Saving Per Year If Your Parents are Rich?
So the money now that's going to our debt and that's going to childcare is still gonna be money that isn't available for us to spend. It's just gonna be going into savings instead, which I cannot wait for. My goal is to be saving at least $100,000 a year, ideally closer to $150,000 a year every year moving forward from 2027 on.
It's an ambitious goal. I don't know if we're going to get there, but a big part of it is getting $50,000 a year into my husband's retirement accounts.
We've spent just under $7,000 in the first three months of the year for debt, just under $7,000 the same three months for childcare. Our next biggest expenses are pretty in line with what everyone else is spending money on. One is home projects and updates, and the other is travel.
Home projects and updates for us is always gonna be one of our biggest spending categories. Our house is 5,300 square feet. It's over 120 years old. There's a lot of improvements to be made always, but more than the house, we live on almost an acre of land that has been fully neglected and we love yard projects.
How Much Does It Cost Per Month to Maintain a Large Historic Home?
So we're not always spending huge amounts of money, tens of thousands of dollars, but most months, especially in the spring and summer, there's something that we want to spend money on. And that something is usually gonna be between $500 and $2,000.
That's in addition to the regular costs that it takes just to have our house function for us. We have a housekeeper who comes every two weeks. We pay her $160 every time she comes. That's $320 a month right there.
We have an amazing garden team that comes at least once a month. I'm always trying to get them to come more. So that's usually somewhere between $500 and $1,500 a month, a little bit less in the winter.
And then as we move into spring and summer and we need a little bit more help, it gets more expensive. I also have an unhealthy addiction to buying plants — who can help themselves — that money falls into this budget as well.
How Much Should You Budget for Travel and Dining Out as a Rich Family?
Travel was a little bit higher than usual. Generally, because of the ages of our kids, we're kind of trying to keep travel spending lower and do bigger trips on an every other year basis instead of on an every year basis.
That being said, my husband and I did splurge this year and spent four or $5,000 on a four day trip to Vegas and it was amazing. Quite a trip, a lot of money, but we had so much fun and we're already planning for when we can do it again.
These are big expenses and a big part of our quarterly spending, but not anything that I would trade because they make our life fun and they bring us enjoyment and fulfillment and happiness, especially the money that we spend on the yard.
Our next expense drives me crazy, but no matter what I do, we cannot seem to get that number lower. In the first quarter of the year, we spent around $3,000 on eating out. I always wanna bring this number down, but it's just something that we cannot seem to do.
What Is the Difference Between Home Maintenance and Home Improvement in a Family Budget?
I don't know why it is. It drives me crazy. Food out is expensive. I think that we eat out an appropriate amount. We could eat out less, but also it's something that, again, we enjoy doing.
It makes our lives easier, we both work really hard. I don't know what we should do. I've just accepted that it's going to be more than I want and I'm going to move on from it right now before it makes me stressed out.
This next one is going to give you a real deep glimpse into my spending psyche. I told you we spent around $4,500 on home and yard maintenance. That means the people that come regularly, our house cleaner, our gardeners, the arborist, people that you can count on as recurring expenses.
We also spent an additional $3,000 on home and yard improvements. The key difference here, it's important for my brain, is that one of those categories is regular and I should expect it to kind of continue in that vein, or at least from, you know, January through March of '26, it should be pretty similar to January through March of '27. Home and yard improvements are more one-time expenses that I don't expect to be repeated.
Why Do Families Spend More on Eating Out Than Groceries and How Do You Fix It?
We bought a new range from Home Depot. We had to fix our roof because we had a roof leak. That's where this $3,000 comes from.
Hopefully expenses that we don't have next year at the same time, but the joys of living in an old house — there are always going to be things that break and things that need to be fixed. And it's a pretty safe bet that when they do, it's gonna cost at least $1,000 no matter what it is.
Tying into my thoughts on eating out, it really annoys me when we spend $3,000 on food out and only $2,000 on groceries, which is what happened over the last three months. It's so much more fun to me to buy fancy groceries and have fun, fancy things that you can eat at home, but the problem with buying fancy groceries is that it requires you to go to the store, to think about what you want to eat, to spend the time and the mental energy.
It's one of the reasons that when I make another $100,000 a year, I'm going to definitely be getting some sort of help in the kitchen, even if it's just buying groceries, but for now, it's what it is. If we spent more money on groceries, we would spend less money on food out. We could probably save $500 a month that way, but it's not something that we've been able to crack just yet because of how many other things are on our minds.
What Is a Healthy Monthly Cash Burn Rate for a High-Net-Worth Family?
That's everything that we spent money on over the last three months that we spent $2,000 or more on. And then after that we have a ton of smaller categories. You have our gym in there, Amazon, insurance, our lawyer, all that kind of stuff that rolls up.
Everything that I've talked about so far is the biggest piece of what we spend money on. We spent $45,000 in the first three months of the year, and that is right on track.
Our cash burn rate is around $15,000 a month. Sometimes it's less. My goal is always for it to be less, but it just doesn't always work out that way.
So far, we're on track this year for our regular spending, and we'll see what happens as we move through the year.
How Much Does a Full Basement Renovation Cost?
You've waited this long, so I want to give you a quick update on what is happening in the basement. If you follow my Instagram stories, you may know they took out a whole bunch of concrete, some of which we kept to upcycle, which is very exciting. They poured new concrete to bring the floors down a little bit.
And I don't think you can hear it, but right now they're actually doing more jackhammering three floors below me to take out the last of the concrete, pour new footers for posts so that our basement will have no visible posts. They're all gonna be in the wall, which is super exciting.
In the first three months of 2026, we spent around $56,000 on the basement, against an overall budget that has shot up to around $400,000 or a little bit more, I think. There were around $50,000 in change orders that happened in the first six weeks of the basement.
And if you haven't remodeled a home before, you're probably thinking, Katherine, what are you doing? That's crazy. But the thing with remodeling, especially if you have money to spend, is that there is always going to be a way to spend it. Because when you have a good GC and they come to you and they say, you could spend the money now and you could get four more inches of head height, you're gonna do it.
Why Should You Always Budget a 30% Contingency for a Home Renovation?
And a lot of the time, these options just are not available for your contractor to understand before they actually start digging into what's happening, before everything's out of the space and they can start to actually do their work. This is why whenever my clients are renovating, I always want them to leave at least a 30% contingency over the bid that they get.
That's for the contingency piece, but it's also because the bid is not always going to include everything. It's not always going to include fixtures, finishes, that expensive tile that you want to buy, all of that.
Overall, we're feeling pretty happy with progress on the basement. It's always a bummer when your project is over budget right from the start, but we did plan for it. We've had great conversations with my parents about it. Everyone's on track.
We're feeling really excited about what the basement is going to look like, especially as we start to get walls up and really see this whole thing take place. If you're interested in a deeper dive into the basement, I can really walk you through everything that was done — lowering the floors, new plumbing, moving walls, insulation, the whole shebang. I don't know if people really want to hear that from me. I'm definitely not a home renovation influencer.
But if you do, drop me a comment on this episode, shoot me an email, send me a DM on Instagram. If you've gone through this budget recap and have other questions or want me to dive into a different topic or do a deeper dive on one specific category of the budget next quarter, then again, reach out to me. You can shoot me an email, katherine@sunnybranchwealth.com, send me a DM on Instagram at @sunnybranchwealth, or if you'd rather just follow along with the podcast, I will catch you on next week's episode of Heir Necessities.
Let’s take the next step together
Understanding how to protect, invest, grow, and/or give away a multi-million dollar inheritance isn’t easy. Inheritors can encounter a wide variety of different situations requiring knowledge and finesse to manage. If you need more help, reach out to Katherine Fox, CFP® and CAP®, financial planner for inheritors, to learn how Sunnybranch can help you evaluate your financial situation and build a plan for your financial future.
