As far as my personal finances went, February was a significant improvement over January.
My student loans are funky right now, because while my bankruptcy is still pending they are on hold. I can pay them if I want but their rates go to 0% (or so I was told by the SallieMae rep). So, I made no student loan payments, but I hope to get those going on a normal schedule in March.
My utility bill is only every other month, so no bill this month.
Total Income (net): $1854.32
Mom: $400 Rent: $450 Savings: $400 Groceries: $183.53 Take-Out: 108.34 Home: $54.48 Entertainment: 50.70 Transportation: 116.81 Church: $40 Fees: $60
Total Expenses: $1803.86
The “fees” category included two co-pays for doctors visits I had in Feb. My knee had been acting up, and not being able to run just doesn’t work for me. So, do the doc I went. It’s feeling better as of late.
I cooked quite a bit more this last month, and ate better as a whole. My take-out (ie, subway, other meals out) was down about $47 dollars.
All in all, I felt pretty good about the month, including being able to save $400.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Debt Kid:
Your take out is still high – try and bring that down to $50 or less.
First, buy your sodas at the store – no reason to pay for the ice and cup at subway when you can pay significantly less for the same product at the local supermarket. Same with the chips. Then, if you feel the need to “eat out” go to subway and just get the sandwich – nothing else…. take the sandwich with your store purchased chips and soda to a park and enjoy while people watching. And, of course, more healthy than the chips is fresh fruit (an orange, apple, etc.).
Good job. You are doing great on tracking your expenses. Just knowing WHERE the money is going is the biggest challenge for most people, and you have that down. I’m kind of a fanatic about tracking expenses, and keep up with everything in Quicken. Looks like you have a good system also.
For me, the next step was setting up a budget, against which I tracked my expenses. Thus, if I budgeted $75 for eating out, once I hit that, it would be over for the month (as I have confessed in a prior post, eating out is my financial vice). I found that I would put off discretionary spending such as eating out to late in the month to make sure I came in under budget – sort of a game I played with myself.
The only thing I would add to your categories above is to separate out medical – fees for whatever are one thing, medical is a totally different category. For me this is a psychological thing – if I go over my budget on medical expenses, it is not like I made that choice (I’m one of those people who does not like to go to the doctor). But if I go over on eating out, that is definitely a choice I made. I like to see that clearly at the end of the year when I look at my budget vs. my actual expenses.
My version of Quicken (the 1999 version – it works and I am too frugal to buy a newer one) allows me to create categories (medical would be one, all the other items you listed would also be categories) and allows me to create classes. I think I would create two classes – personal and business, and then something like rent, which I understand is partially charged to your business, could be one transaction split into two classes. In addition (and the point of my mentioning this) is that Quicken also allows you to define your categories as Required or Discretionary. So you define a grocery budget to eat at home for the entire month as required, and an eating out budget as discretionary. It also allows you to budget over the course of a year. So for example, you don’t know what month you might need to see a doctor, but over the course of a year you figure an average of 3 or so co-pays. Then you save that prorated amount each month.
…and before you, as a computer geek, admonish me for using the 1999 version of Quicken, I do plan to make sure I update at least every 10 years to ensure the new version will still support import of my old data. I figure I can buy an old copy of Quicken 2007 or so for cheap off of the net in a year or two.
Keep up the good work. You are taking all the right steps to get there.