The Cost of Owning A Horse

On the 5th of August I will have owned Otis for 1 month. I am making this post a bit early, because I started purchasing stuff I would need in order to bring him home on the 28th of June. I wanted to make sure only 1 instance of board was on there, as well as 1 instance of making a payment to his past owner.

As a rule, I am absolutely fascinated with how much people spend on their horses monthly, and I have been diligently recording every transaction in order to find out how much I am spending on my equine. Though in reality, I still haven't realized that he's even mine yet. Here's what I have spent so far:

$41 - Lead, salt block, thrushbuster, etc. Little things that I didn't have but would need.
$55 - Heavy weight blanket (I still need at least a sheet before winter) got this on super sale!
$1500 - Purchase price, though I will be making payments monthly until I get to the actual purchase price.
$50 - Trailering to the new barn.
$40 - 2 bags of feed to help transition him onto the new barn's feed.
$370 - Board.
$5 - Wormer.
$32 - Lunge line... should have gotten a lunge whip too but I am stingy.
$50 - Fly spray concentrate, a couple other little things.
$27 - DIY jump poles. The lumber was super on sale so I had to go for it and I also painted them. 6 poles.
$85 - Farrier (trim, patched up a missing chunk, sealed them, and we made a plan to improve them.)
$60 - Approximate amount of money in gas spent to go to/from the barn 7 days a week.

Adding all of that together, and I spent $2,315 in a month. It sounds like a lot to me, but if I break it down into a list of things I will buy in the upcoming months, it became more like $665. That's still a lot of money as a just-graduated-college-with-no-full-time-job human, but when I think about how much I was spending when leasing:

$350 - Lease.
$110-$160 - Lessons.
$140+ - The ASTRONOMICAL amount of gas I had to use to drive to him an hour away.

2 hours added to my trip to the barn made it an entire day kind of thing. Do not miss that.

Not to mention I was still buying him little things constantly. Leasing 3 days a week put me at $650/month. So purchasing did have a much higher up-front cost, but in the long run I was spending about the same. However, I now am allowed to ride as much as I want and can feasibly drive like 14 whole miles round-trip to see him, instead of being limited to 3 by the lease and the inability to drive 100 miles round trip all the time. Another benefit to this is I don't need oil changes as frequently and am not putting as many miles on my poor car. This definitely saves me money in the long run!

Ok this is getting long because I don't have any relevant media to break up the horrible amount of numbers. I realize that a lot of people that buy a horse don't have tack and such, but luckily I have been spending money while in college on used tack, so as of right now we are set on that front! Go past also-poor me!

I'm curious, how much do you spend on your horse a month?