I’ve learned a lot from tracking my spending money over these past few months and I thought I would start posting my weekly spending totals on Sundays. This week has been a good and bad week for spending: I have spent under my $100 limit in the entertainment spending money category – including food & dining, entertainment, and cash withdrawal – this is a success. I
When you’re trying to balance socializing with maintaining a budget, you can run into problems pretty quickly. You’re first thought might be that you have to become a hermit and avoid answering the phone for the next two years to pay off your debt, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Before you move out to the isolated shack in the mountains, read this article! Socializing &
In a previous post, I said I wanted to start tracking my spending using Quicken as part of my “weekly” challenge series. As it turns out, “weekly” turned out to be three weeks since I grossly underestimated how much time it would take to enter in three months worth of expenses. Finally, however, I have inputted the last three months of expenses into Quicken –
When I started writing out what my resolutions, I had no idea how life-changing some of these goals would be. I had a foggy idea that I wanted to spend more time with my friends and make more money – that was it. Things started to come together when I began acting on some of my resolutions, like contesting and spending more time with my
When I think about impulse spending, I think about those moments when I’m teetering on the edge of buying something I know I shouldn’t buy. There is that build-up of tension that comes from the indecision, that see-saw feeling of “Will I? Won’t I?” and then sudden relief when I let go and just spend the money. There’s the swell of pleasure and gratification followed shortly by
This week, I’m profiling an article by Crystal over at “Give Me Back My Five Bucks”. Crystal recently wrote an article about lifestyle inflation which got me thinking about how this might apply to my own life. I never thought about myself as someone who fell victim to this idea of “trading up” or “keeping up with the Joneses” but it turns out that I
So this week’s financial challenge was to avoid buying coffee for the week. I want to save money and make coffee at home in the morning and go for a walk and/or have a bottle of water in the afternoon – when I usually buy my second coffee. This challenge was a bit of a mixed bag of success and failure. Financial Challenge Fail: What
