I am being very diligent about tracking my expenses and spending less. Until my lifestyle stabilizes a bit, I am not going to really see an improvement in my overall debt total, but it is important to establish some good habits and improve my financial decision-making skills now.
Period: February 28 – March 12, 2020
I gave up on my planned budgeting for last paycheck with $130.62 unaccounted for. (It happens, particularly when first starting out. I just did not have the mental capacity to deal with it any longer.)
After tracking my expenses for this period though, I was left with $184.23 in my accounts. However, I had a plan for $154.78 of this money, leaving only $29.45 unaccounted for. That’s over $100 that I did have a place for, I just couldn’t see it at the time. Even though I do not fully use cash envelopes because I like earning points for using my debit and credit cards, if I did use cash envelopes, part of those funds left over in my account would be as follows:
- Cushion: $24
- Gas: $20
- Food: $30
- Gifts/Dates: $15
- Medical: $10
- Natural Gas: $13.78 (This one isn’t really an envelope, but I spent less than I budgeted. I’m not moving it to another expense because the weather is still funny-acting.)
The breakdown of my expenses looks like this:
- Debt: 44.9%
- Eating Out: 1%
- Groceries: .6%
- Fun Money: 2.3%
- Gas – 1%
- Household – .2%
- Housing/Utilities = 40.1%
- Insurance – 2.6%
- Miscellaneous – .6%
- Sinking Funds/Savings – 6.7%
What have I learned so far?
- Making sure I track (write down) my expenses every few days, if not daily, helps reinforce my goal.
- Not eating out, intentional spending, and staying at home have helped keep my costs low. Duh.
- I did much better with my planned budget for the next paycheck, leaving nothing unaccounted for.
Let’s see how close to this I eventually get.