Budget Budge-it Budget

[Gemini Cricket]

Originally Posted by innerSpaceman

Hence, a LOVER is the only logical solution.

Do cowboys make bank? Hmmm. Liz Taylor did pretty well for herself in Giant...

[madmonkeygirl]

GC good luck on the budgeting. It took me forever to get a budget that we can live with. As far as lunches go if i get a lunch break at work then i bring my own food if i don't then i grab something on my way home since i eat at home before i go to work (it equals out money wise).....coupons i hate them...lmao

I always use cash first never charge anything anymore. (yes i've been putting money aside for entertainment mainly concerts coming up) that way i have the money for tickets rather than putting them on credit yet again.

Sorry to hear your apartment is so expensive rent wise. That seems to be happening all over lately due to the housing market. That's why i'm glad we own even if it is a mobile home and we have to pay monthly rent space but hey it beats what they were are charging for an apartment.

Sorry to hear about your Disneyland AP expiring. I took my tax refund money and renewed mine with it. The only way i could renew it. I might have to do that again this year or else figure something out but have almost a year to worry about that.

For holidays for my friends i make things for their presents. Cut the costs down and it costs a few bucks to get the materials that i need to make presents. Family we do a gift exchange so we don't have to buy everyone a present. It really cuts down the expenses. In previous years i could spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars but not now.

Good luck

[Alex]

Keeping a budget for a while doesn't just tell you how to cut out all of the fun from your life but also helps to make sure you are actually spending the money on things that are of a priority to you.

I've never really been a budgeter. When I have money I spend it and when I don't I stop spending it. I've always been good at that and it has worked for me and we've never really operated on a large credit load. But when I was looking at quitting Wells and working on MousePlanet full time we did have to spend some time looking at the math.

Once we did that it showed that we could pretty much cut our income by 40% without dramatically altering the parts of our lifestyle that were important to us. I stopped spending $150/month on DVDs (which I like to have but never actually watch). We ate at home more often (but still ate out a fair bit). We cut back on the spontaneous three-day road trips (where the huge expense was rack-rate hotel rooms since we often didn't know where we'd be until we got there).

And it can reveal some surprisingly easy ways to stop spending money in places you just don't think about. Spending $3 for a cup of coffee seems negligible, perhaps, but less so when you combine that and realize it is $720/year if you grab one every day on the way to work simply because it is more convenient than some alternative. One thing I learned when we looked at the budget was that I was spending about $200/year on newspapers essentially so that I could do the crossword puzzle on the train home.

One thing GC mentions is that he has a Costco membership. Though it is an annual expense, since he says he doesn't cook at home much I'd make a strong guess that this is an expense that comes nowhere near paying for itself. You generally have to spend thousands of dollars at Costco to recoup the expense in product savings.

If the big strain is the apartment and you're locked in for a long while, you might consider talking to your management or landlords about it. Letting them know that you can squeeze the payments but that you've maybe bitten off more than is comfortable and that if they can place the unit you'd be interested in moving on. The worst thing they can do is say no.

[MouseWife]

I would make the packed lunch more of an adventure. Take it somewhere and enjoy the view. Or make it part of a walk. Heck, you don't have to eat a big lunch every day.

I eat fruit all day and then enjoy dinner with the family.

[Gemini Cricket]

Once when I was in Monterey, I actually froze my credit cards. Literally. I wrapped them in a sandwich bag and then wrapped that sandwich bag in duct tape. Then I immersed it in a jar of water and stuck it in the freezer. It prevented me from using my cards (and since I don't have a good memory, I never committed any of my card numbers to memory) and I got the balance down.
It totally works. I think I got the idea from Suze Orman on PBS...

[Scrooge McSam]

Preach, Alex!

(that would be visible mojo)

[Ghoulish Delight]

All I'm saying is don't knock it 'till you try it.

I'm good with money, thanks to learning from my parents who are masters. I lived for 8 years on my own without tracking my spending and ended up in a position where I could afford to buy property, so believe me, I know how to do the in-my-head-accounting thing. But buying said property constituted a major shift in my baseline, and getting down on paper exactly how much was going out became a necessity, at least to see it once so I could figure my new mental baseline.

I didn't expect to get much out of it other than a couple bottom line numbers. I was surprised as anyone by how much just seeing the numbers in front of me changed how I thought about spending. With it spelled out in black and white (well, actually, several different colors thanks to Excel), it wasn't even an effort to start increasing the amount of saving I was doing. When I could see in near real-time how much a simple decision like packing lunches or splitting an entree (amazing how much of one's spending flexibility involves food) was affecting the bottom line, those simple decisions that didn't negatively affect my quality of life and yet positively affected my budget bacame very very easy.

[Gemini Cricket]

Yes, I was thinking about talking to my landlord. She loves me. I should talk to her. I also need to talk to her if I'm going the room mate route...

The Costco membership is split still between Ralphie and me. I stockpile dinner foods from them. It seems to be saving me some money buying in bulk. That 50lb bag of rice was only $12.79. That's not bad.

[Alex]

Oh, with the Costco, it is paid for so use it while you have it, but when it comes time to renew you might want to do some mental math on whether it is paying for itself (and if it is, great).

Lani and I thought ours was but we then found that with a little bit of effort we could match prices on most things elsewhere and that frequently we bought something in bulk that never got used completely (getting twice as much for 150% the cost is not a savings if you only use 70% of it). While other items do eventually get used but end up being annual or semi-annual purchases so saving $5 on the big jug of Tide doesn't necessarily go far towards recouping the $100 (or whatever it is, I've never been the one that pays it) for membership.

If you want to start saving a bit, open a separate savings account that is not associated with your current accounts (maybe even at a different bank) and have a portion of your pay directly deposited there. Most larger employers should be able to handle split direct deposits and as was said above it is much easier to not spend money you never see. Be sure to put the ATM card they send you in a drawer somewhere safe and forget about it. Freezing your credit cards may be a big extreme but if you have low impulse control in using them, definitely take them out of your wallet and put them somewhere you'll have to think about before using them.

[BarTopDancer]

Originally Posted by Gemini Cricket

That 50lb bag of rice was only $12.79. That's not bad.

It's only not bad if you eat it...