Monthly Roundup - September

End of another month! This is the first month that I have not reached my Monthly Challenge goal, and I am upset about this. My goal for this month was $150, and I have reached $128.01 (85.34%).

Here's the summary:

$20.00 – Textbook Sale
$32.90 - Online Surveys
$11.07 - Coupon Savings
$62.30 - Amazon Sales
$1.74 - Interest
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$128.01 (Goal - $21.99)
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I am quite amazed at the amount I made using Online Surveys, although to be quite honest, some of the surveys were done a month or so ago, and I only got the money this month. Another area I am impressed by is “Coupon Savings”. I was a savvy shopper this month and stocked up on some things on sale and used coupons for these things as well. So that’s good. Although I did not actually reach my target goal, I think I am going to still have $150 as the goal for next month and see how it goes. Since I only was operating on a half month’s salary in September, all the challenge money goes towards my expenses, and nothing actually goes towards savings or debt elimination, but all in all, I still feel proud of myself.

My budget is another story altogether. I went over again this month – by $185.52. The main culprits were – losses at the casino, and when my sister was visiting, I paid for her gas, took her grocery shopping at Sam’s Club and treated her to a nice time out. I usually pamper my baby sister - she is a student too, and poorer than I am, so I don’t feel particular guilty about this. I also had very few no-spend days. Here are my “Pamper Account” details:

No-Spend Days: 8
Spend-Only Days: 13
Eat-Out Days: 9
Pamper account total: -$12 (including last month)

This is horrifying! My resolution for next month is: I will spend money ONLY on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays (not including regular, fixed expenses such as rent etc.). My hope is that by holding off on getting something I want to buy until the weekends, I will be able to control my cash-flow better. I don’t know if I can actually pull this off, but I will try.

I Am Bad At Budgeting

Here is a confession - I am horrible at budgeting!!! I think I have a very arrogant and stupidly positive view about my own self-control. I under-budget for a lot of categories every month and I seem to always go over. I thought I'd do a mid-month round up of where I am at:

Over budget by - $115.28 (I'll get about $30 of this back from a return eventually)

No-Spend Days: 3
Spend-Only Days: 6
Eat-Out Days: 5
Pamper account total: -$10.

Hmm... any idiot can see that I am doing it all wrong. !!GROAN!!

August, So Far…

Since my assistantship contract at work starts only on the 15th of August, I’ll have only half a month’s pay at the end of August. I sat down and tallied the expected income and expenses. It’s a horrifying looking spreadsheet. However, I have decided to make a few changes. I am not sending any money towards savings this month, I shall use my snowflake and extra income money to pay for the semester fees and keep the rest in my checking account to tide me over till the end of September. If I am frugal and stick to my budget, I will manage to scrape by without digging into my savings. We’ll see how that goes…

So far, I have not had a single no-spend day this month. However, I only have had one evening of eating out. Taking stock of my pantry definitely helped in terms of planning meals. The pity of it is sometimes I don’t want to eat what is in my pantry. I’ve been busy cooking. I went and bought the silicone baking mats I wanted ($10.63 at Wal-Mart). So, yesterday was baking day – I made raspberry scones and sundried-tomato biscotti from ingredients I had at home. Also, a friend of mine gave me a HUGE bunch of basil that she grew in her garden. I kept a chunk of it to use as garnish, on pizzas and to add to bruschetta topping, and made pesto with the rest. And then, I used up a lot of the pesto in a HUGE batch of olive-artichoke-pesto-pasta (in order to use up more stuff I had at home but was not using). And I made some delicious Baba Ghanouj (using up an eggplant and half of the tahini I have in my fridge), and a large batch of pita chips. So all in all it was a good couple of days of cooking – at least it prevented me from going out to eat! Tonight, I picked up a bread machine from a fellow freecycler. I have never used a bread-machine before, but hopefully I will be able to make fun breads with the machine and use up more of the various flours I have at home.

On a sadder note, it looks like I will not be able to continue with the English speaking partner any more. We met for about a week and then our schedules started to clash. And it now looks like our semester schedules don’t match either. Oh well… maybe some other opportunity will pop up somewhere.

Budget Slip-Ups and August Goals

I went over my budget much more this month (+ $146.17) than last month (+ $27.25). The main culprit areas were: Groceries (+ $74.49), Eating Out (+ $27.81), and Misc (+ $50.80). I really must be better about my budget than I am right now. Especially impulse grocery purchases (though I have a pantry full of stuff that needs to be used up), and impulsive eating out when I am too lazy to cook.

I spent a good three hours today reorganizing my kitchen and pantry and taking stock of all the food I have at home – all cleanly entered and color-coded in Excel. I know… it seems mad, but it will prove very useful the next few months. I am amazed at how much stuff my small pantry holds! I am even more amazed at some of the things I purchased. No doubt at some point I thought I was going to cook and eat these things, but they were stupid purchases anyway. I will have to be very creative the next few months, and I am not looking forward to it, but it will be fun to restock once I have used up a lot of this stuff.

Here are my goals for August:
• I’m going to halve my grocery and eating out budget to guilt myself into cooking more at home and using up supplies that I already have.
• Stick to the budget as much as possible.
• Maximize my snowflakes and send it towards paying my semester university fees (my tuition is paid for by my department, but the miscellaneous fees are not). This would be approx. $330 for the whole semester.
• Talk w. payroll and see if my extra pay (for the 5hrs/wk I am working on a grant application for my professor) can be sent separately directly to another account so I can use it for internship applications and/or travel expenses to India at the end of this year. If they can’t do this, set it up myself through the bank.
• List more stuff on Craigslist and Amazon, and hope it sells.

I Love Craigslist

I pulled out a bunch of stuff I was not using and snapped some pictues and posted them on Craigslist yesterday. I have already got one buy (a set of baking pans for $5.00) and three more potential buys. Isn't it fun? Most things were small, but I also had a couple of pieces of furniture that I don't really need. I think the key is to post pictures on there too.

I've had a couple of no-spend days in the past week. My challenge of cooking at eating at home is working fine. I made some parsley-oregano pesto last night and tossed it into some rotini pasta with some garlic, olives, artichokes, dried pepper flakes and romano cheese. It was delightful. But today and tomorrow, I am lunching out with friends. My budget is looking awful right now.... all negative numbers.

June Budget Roundup

I've got to rush, so I'll make this quick. My June budget was was $27.25 over budget. While this is not too alarming, I did go over on two categories.

Groceries - over by $50.44
Eating Out - over by $48.43

Since I saved over $75 in my Misc category, I didn't go over by too much - maybe I need to re-evaluate my budget!