The Long Road

09/05/2005 Archived Entry: "Fiscally Yours"

Fiscal responsibility is something I have trouble with. No Joke. Without ever really keeping track of how much I spend and on what, I know that I spend roughly 1000$ a month on “non-essential” (y’know, anything not rent-food-bills). Last winter I summarized all my spendings for the work-term to see where I had gone wrong (ie: I was all like “What the pho?! Where’d my all my money go?). Alas, the exercise of summarizing four months worth of spending is a long and tedious one. One that I had planned on but had never reenacted. Now that life is no longer easily divisible into 4 month chunks, it seems like a weird thing to do anyways.

However, life IS easily divisible into ONE month bite-size chunks! So in the spirit of attempting to achieve some semblance of fiscal responsibility, I have endeavoured to record all of my income and expenses in Microsoft’s wonderful Excel software!

As you’ll soon see, that 1000$ figure is pretty close for August…if by pretty close I mean “exceeded by almost 400$”. It seems a bit excessive, but in August I did get a bunch of stuff for my bed + bedroom so that made a bit of a difference. In any case, I spend WAY too much. For the month of September, I should limit myself to X$ per week and not spend beyond that. Not sure what figure would be appropriate..perhaps 200$?

Anyways, here’s my August income and expenses sheet. Help me decide where I should trim! (some numbers are x’d out because…I dunno, it seems like I should). This’ll also give you a really, really good idea of what I did last month.

Replies: 4 comments

only 23$ on alcohol?

Posted by et_god @ 09/07/2005 01:26 PM EST

$0 on presents for melpie? i'm so saddened.

it looks like one of the huge issues are the credit card payments. are these payments for past debt as opposed to payments to cover the other expenses you had (i assume that you bought at least some of your consumables and material things on credit ... but maybe that's just me being naive).

Posted by melpie @ 09/07/2005 03:48 PM EST

credit card payments were for previous months =D

Im done paying off the credit cards though so september should look a lot more rosy.

Posted by Rayne @ 09/07/2005 04:13 PM EST

that'll pretty much halve your expenses! although, this is assuming that all your august expenses are already paid off and therefore, you won't have to use september to make debt payments.

this is making my head spin right round, right round. it's like a record baby.

Posted by melpie @ 09/08/2005 02:12 PM EST