4 200 A Month Is How Much A Year

[Sharon Harris]

Eachyear, we review the records of all Social Security beneficiaries who have wages reported for the previous year. If your latest year of earnings is one of your highest years, we recalculate your benefit and pay you any increase you are due. The increase is retroactive to January of the year after you earned the money.

When you begin receiving Social Security retirement benefits, you are considered retired for our purposes. You can get Social Security retirement or survivors benefits and work at the same time. However, there is a limit to how much you can earn and still receive full benefits.

If your earnings will be more than the limit for the year and you will receive retirement benefits for part of the year, we have a special rule that applies to earnings for 1 year. The special rule lets us pay a full Social Security benefit for any whole month we consider you retired, regardless of your yearly earnings.

If you receive survivors benefits, we use your full retirement age, for retirement benefits when applying the annual earnings test (AET) for retirement or survivors benefits. Although the full retirement age for survivors benefits may be earlier, for AET purposes, we use your full retirement age for retirement benefits. This rule applies even if the beneficiary is not entitled to retirement benefits.

When we figure out how much to deduct from your benefits, we count only the wages you make from your job or your net profit if you're self-employed. We include bonuses, commissions, and vacation pay. We don't count pensions, annuities, investment income, interest, veterans benefits, or other government or military retirement benefits.

You should consider saving 10 - 15% of your income for retirement. Sound daunting? Don't worry: your employer match, if you have one, counts. If you save 5% of your income and your boss matches another 5%, you've accomplished a 10% savings rate. Our online tools can help you calculate your needs for retirement and other financial goals.

How can you save such a large sum? First, calculate your monthly cost-of-living. Assume that if you lose your job, you'll sacrifice luxuries such as pedicures or your premium cable TV package. How much do you need to survive?

Make a list of major expenses within the next decade, ranging from replacing your gutters to throwing your wedding. (If it's easier, list broad categories like "home repairs," "holidays" and "wedding.")

Write your ideal savings goal target and deadline. Divide by the number of months remaining to see how much you should save. Want to pay cash for a $10,000 car in five years? You'll need $167 per month.

Meanwhile, another 50% (maximum) should go toward necessities, while 30% goes toward discretionary items. This is called the 50/30/20 rule of thumb, and it provides a quick and easy way for you to budget your money.

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Figuring out a sleep routine is the biggest challenge here. The good news is that babies usually don't require much beyond breast milk or formula and diapers at this point. If you're breastfeeding, your costs will be lower (aside from the one-time expense of a pump, which costs anywhere from $40 to $185), while powdered formula could cost you $400 to $800 a month if your baby is exclusively formula-fed.2

Add about $60 for bottles and $75 for the monthly diapers and wipes you'll go through. There are vaccinations your baby should get and a couple of visits to the doctor during these months, which should be budgeted for as well. It's also time to start assessing your future financial goals. Estimated monthly amount: $300 (unless your baby is exclusively formula-fed).

If you return to work after the baby is born, childcare could take up the lion's share of your budget starting this month. According to Care.com data, weekly childcare costs have risen significantly over the past six years.

Sometime around the five-month mark, the baby reaches a milestone in development and begins eating solid foods. Parents often start with purees, which you can easily make yourself. Compared with food for older kids, babies still get the bulk of their calories from milk or formula. But plan on spending roughly $50 a month on foods like applesauce, oatmeal, and avocados.

Your growing baby is fitting into new clothes on a regular basis now. Baby clothes are the most common gift that new parents receive, but the average cost of clothes is around $50 a month for the first year. Using hand-me-downs or shopping at second-hand clothing stores can help you save in this area. Estimated monthly amount: $1,100

By this time, you may be thinking about a babysitter, maybe for a few hours here and there or to give you and your spouse an occasional night out. If you don't have a friend or family member to watch your child, you may need to add babysitting to your childcare budget.

Congratulations, you made it through your first year of parenting! By this point, you should have an idea of what's needed in your monthly baby budget, so hopefully there won't be any surprise expenses. As you prepare for the second year, start looking at ways you can save on childcare and new items you'll need. And plan for an additional $50 this month to treat yourself to a celebration. Estimated monthly amount: $1,300.

Having a baby can be an amazing journey filled with excitement and wonder. While variables around geography, childcare needs, and insurance coverage may impact how much you spend on your child, there are clear advantages to working with a New York Life agent early on to develop a financial strategy for your child.

Personally, if this was a running thing that I wanted to automate, one of the steps I'd do is create a month and year column (=month(Date@row) for example) that extracts the month and year from the Date column and use that to make a column formula like this:

Need help with this formula but to calculate for several months in a year. I've tried various syntax's to try including month 1-12 (Jan-Dec) but keep getting errors. i.e. how to calculate average of Boiler Gas Usage Daily for January, Feb, March, April etc..

Thank you so much! But this example formula is for one month only, my trouble is how to add for months January through December (this is how my data is, not based off of the example at the top where it's showing only for april (4)) do I add a comma and add the following months??

I only want to find the average of each month per year (i.e. 2023, 2024 etc) separately using one long formula I can use down an entire column called "Average Duration" that will satisfy all months and relevant years that appear. Average Duration would calculate average value per month/year that are listed under Month and Year and using corresponding values under "incident duration"

If you suggest outputting values separely, is there a way to display on same page without interfering with the used columns? I'd like to display at the top of the same smartsheet where values are also located. How would I associate value with the correct text in month? It'll only output a value but it would be nice if i.e. January = 1234

I'm thinking another option, can you provide guidance on how I can use averageif statement referencng values in another smartsheet? I'd like to pull in values from another sheet to calculate average duration in another sheet.

If this works for you, I would suggest going down that route instead of the other formulas above - let me know what you would prefer doing. If you'd rather keep the formulas in the same sheet, it would be helpful to see a screen capture of your sheet but please block out sensitive data.

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