A Challenge

2 posts in one day?! wha?!!!

Okay...here's a challenge to myself. It's really gonna test my frugal abilities.

After buying lunch today, I have $99 to get me through next Tuesday (I get paid at midnight). This includes a trip to new york from Saturday morning until Sunday night.

Can I do it? hm...maybe. I'm letting myself cheat for the $30 bus tickets. Those will go on my credit card and paid off with my check next week. Tonight I'll be grocery shopping, and I sense a lot of beans and rice in my future. Funny...that's all I ate for lunch last week, too.

a grocery dilemma

I went grocery shopping on Wednesday (the first day on my new budget). This is the first time in a very long time I was consciously trying to squeeze the most food out of my dollars and not get the fanciest local organic stuff available. I imagined trying to shop like my mom did when me and my brothers were little. Sale jelly, sale peanut butter, sale yogurt, sale bread, bulk cream of wheat, etc. Just the staples. And I did good; I got breakfast and lunch supplies for a couple weeks for $17.

But when I got home I looked a little closer at what I had gotten and was really frustrated. Everything I bought except for the cream of wheat has high fructose corn syrup as the second or third ingredient. This makes me even more angry at those creepy corn lobby sponsored HFCS commercials. They talk about "consumed in moderation" as if it's not used as filler in every single food thing you eat in one day if you can't afford the types of things that don't include it. I bet I would have easily spent closer to $30 on the same things if I had gotten the Stonybrook organic yogurt, the local traditionally produced jelly, and so on (not the natural peanut butter though, that stuff is gross). It's maddening.

I'm just glad I'm not raising kids on a budget like this. I would hate for my choices to be feed them crap or not at all. As for me, I think I'll just spend a little more next time.

plans are important

Ok, so some who know me (or at least one who knows me), understands my penchant for plans. I like to make plans. I'm not a crazy person who freaks out when plans change, but I like to have plans so that there is something to change in the first place. It also makes getting out of bed in the morning a little easier when I have an agenda.

anyway.

My first step in personal financial planning (at this point it's much more like financial management than planning, but there's my attachment to 'plans' at stake) was to make technology work for me in this battle.

Enter mint.com!

Basically, mint is a great little website that takes a lot of the painful parts out of budgeting. The magic goes somewhat like this:

1) make an account and attach it to your bank account (there's a whole 5 page thing about the security of this on the site, and I would suggest reading it because it makes sense)
2) mint downloads your debit card/credit card transactions every night and categorizes them into types of spending. you can re-categorize things when the software doesn't recognize a transaction, but it learns what businesses you shop at once you tell it.
3) watch the pie-graph go!

So there you go. With about zero effort I now have two months' history of spending trended out for me on easy to read graphs. It even lets you label cash you get out of the ATM. You can also add any investment accounts you have (for me, that's zero), or loans you have (my student loan sits there reminding me to pay it).

Seriously, this is the most useful thing the internet has given me in a while. It sends me emails when my checks clear and when my balance is low, but you can set it to your own preferences. I really advocate signing up and getting a look at what it can do for you. I know this just sounds like a commercial, but my bank's website is really annoying and hard to navigate, so this has just done so much for me.

Ok, I'll get off this particular soapbox now. Coming up: scheduling bills. Yeah....I've never done that. wheeeeeeeeeeee