Startup co-founder and CEO: My budget and planning for the future

I'm Jon Mattingly. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Kodable. I make $75,000 a year. Money for me is a means to an end. Because I am so focused on building a company right now, I really just want enough money to pay my expenses, be comfortable, not be in need, and other than that, I don't really need a ton of it. So, I make $75,000 a year. If you think about that on a monthly basis, that's about $6,250 a month. Roughly $2,000 or $1,900 of that goes towards taxes, health insurance, various things like that. So after expenses, you know, things you can't get away from, you've got roughly $4,300 a month in income. My rent right now is $1,500 a month. I live with two people two blocks down the street, which is great, but I live with other people to kind of decrease my expenses. If I lived alone, it would be considerably more. It'd probably be closer to $3,000. You know, the gas bill, the electric bills comes out to about 60 bucks a month, internet's about 30, and then I've got a phone bill of about $40 a month. My various car expenses comes to about $500 a month. That's including, you know, the car payment, insurance, gas, maintenance. I'm lucky I don't have any student loans so that doesn't come into it. My food comes to about $300 a month. Something I do to save money, I actually do meal prep. The bigger reason was to lose weight, but I cook all my meals for the week before I start, so that comes to about 35, $40 for a full week of meals, which is pretty good. Saves a ton of money so I don't have to eat at restaurants or other things like that, and it's a lot more convenient. So, other than that, I have about $1,000 for various, you know, things that I might do for fun, you know, maybe go out with my friends for a drink after work or, you know, go up to Tahoe to snow board for a weekend, things like that. It gives me about $1,000 to, you know, invest in myself and really put myself at a level where I feel comfortable coming into the office and I'm not feeling too tired and too down. So after all of those expenses, you end up with about $875 leftover. I try to save about $500 a month. This leaves you with around 300 to 400, $375 in incidentals. You have various things come up. Maybe you need to go to the doctor, you get hurt, or you've got a bill or if get in an accident or something like that. And the other thing that I do is I spend for a gym membership that's about $44 a month. A lot of my finances I am kind of playing it by ear. I would be lying if I wasn't hoping that I'd get some kind of financial windfall from Kodable, which would be great. Ideally before I start a family, I'd like to have all my finances in order. Whether or not that happens remains to be seen. Kind of just playing it by ear right now. I'm very fortunate in that I am a programmer and in the Bay Area, it's relatively easy to get a job as a programmer, and that does give me some security, because you know, the starting salary for a programmer with five years of experience that I have is around $150,000 a year, which is a lot more than I make now and if things were ever to not work out with Kodable, I could move into that career profession very quickly and easily and have a lot more money and be better taken care of. I think one thing I wish I'd known about money before I really, you know, went into a career, is that it's a tool, I think, that I do not agree with people that pinch every penny and they don't, you know, they're 24 and they have, you know, 50 grand saved up for retirement and everything else. I mean, and you're young especially, like you want to enjoy life. You want, like, you get one. You get one life, and money, like it or not, is one of the biggest enablers to having an enjoyable life. It gives you a lot of freedom to enjoy things. The biggest freedom you get from being rich isn't having the money, it's being able to do whatever you want, and I think that you shouldn't sacrifice your quality of life to save more than you need to do. That's the caveat. You wanna save what you need to save, but at the same time, it's like, it's like a hammer, you know. You buy a hammer and the day you get it, it's gonna be shiny, it's gonna be pretty, you're gonna like it, and if you hang it up on the wall in the closet and you never use it, it's pretty much worthless, and the same thing with money. Money's a tool to help you enjoy and succeed at your life.