I have to confess, this whole budgeting thing is way harder than I thought it would be. It could be that I have just become so obsessive about not spending money that when it comes down to the wire and I only have $5 left, I panic.
My boyfriend was in town this past week and that is one of the rare times I am able to truly let loose and relax. When he is in town, I don’t typically rush, write to-do lists, write updated to-do lists, and spend a long time at the gym, stress about homework, extra-curricular activities or tennis. But this is the first time he has been in town since I began this budget—and looking back I realize that I wasn’t obsessing over spending my money wisely, either.
I went over my budget by $78.58 plus delved $45 deep into my summer savings for my gas-guzzling Jeep Cherokee in order to make it home to Pennsylvania tomorrow for a family weekend.
It felt wrong to go over my budget in light of this blog. I am supposed to be teaching people ways to save money, but this past weekend made me feel like a fraud. So what I’ve done is gone through my receipts that I saved, and in an attempt to let others learn from my mistakes I have thought of ways I could have avoided spending too much. In some cases though I don’t regret having spent the money…there just could have been cheaper options.
1.) Went to Lucky Strike, a fancy bowling alley in D.C with sister and boyfriend: $36.63.
•Why didn’t we just eat dinner at home? We had plenty of groceries.
•Three whiskey sours—although they did help my bowling game, did not help with saving money.
2.) Throwing random candy into my boyfriend’s Valentine’s gift bag was definitely a necessity.
•However, I could have gone to the Dollar Store and gotten that bag of M&Ms, a Kit-Kat Bar, Sweethearts, Snickers and Skittles for $5. Instead I spent $10.26 in a convenience store.
•Please don’t think I’m cheap. It’s just little things like this that I am noticing that make a difference.
3.) A smoothie at Freshens: $4.48
•I ordered it because I was super hungry after conditioning with my team, but now I realize that a cup of some unidentified fruit juice, frozen berries and ice do not add up to $4.48!
•I should have waited until I got home to snack on something I already owned.
•The smoothie wasn’t even that good.
4.) But I didn’t learn to snack at home yet. I spent another $2.21 on cereal the next day for lunch.
•I have cereal at home. I could have packed a lunch, but I wasn’t thinking.
•I know $2.21 really is not a lot, but in the end all of these additional charges add up.
5.) Driving to the airport, D.C and back twice, around town and to the airport again: $25.00.
•This charge on my credit card brought me to the grand total of $78.58 over budget.
•A simple solution would have been taking the metro to and from D.C.
•More carpooling or walking could have sufficed for our local journeys.
•I was way too excited to pick my boyfriend up at the airport so I wouldn’t have changed that. Although, I wouldn’t have minded never driving him back to the airport to leave…I bet that could have saved me a good $3.00 on gas!
I promise I will try my hardest not to give in again. This is all a learning process and I am prepared for ups and downs. Right now I am very excited to get back on track with my budgeting. I have a plan to take out less, probably about $100 rather than $150 a week, until I have made up for this past week’s mishaps.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Love Doesn't Cost A Thing
Just because you're in a relationship does not mean you have to spend a lot of money on your significant other in order to show that you care.
Constantly buying material goods like: clothing, jewelry, shoes, cars, etc. are all great presents, but at the end of the day--are any of those items necessary? Will you truly get satisfaction out of the latest Jessica Simpson heels from Nordstrom's that your boyfriend bought you for Valentine's Day? If your answer is yes, then you probably aren't interested in this blog.
Receiving inexpensive gifts from your partner doesn’t mean they love you any less. Perhaps the reason they buy you material goods in the first place is because they are too scared to get creative. Buying something that's already a finished product like clothing or jewelry is safe. Whereas creating something from scratch can be intimidating, especially if you are testing your "creative juices" for the first time.
But the beautiful thing about getting creative is that you are the inventor and no one can tell you what you've created is wrong.
A good place to start is by collecting memorabilia from your relationship. Think in terms of movie ticket stubs, pictures, programs from plays you’ve seen together and images that remind you of them. If your partner has ever been written about or photographed in a newspaper, those are also great items to collect. After you’ve gathered a substantial amount of items you’ll be able to organize a scrapbook filled with images that symbolize your partner. Anyone’s heart would melt if they saw how someone took so much time to put something like a scrapbook together.
If your partner loves to cook and experiment with food, search around the internet for quirky recipes that you think they would be interested in making and put together a personal cookbook.
You also can’t fail by going to a local arts and crafting store like A.C. Moore. There you can finds hundreds of crafty items from designing glass vases, t-shirts, wreaths, pictures, mirrors, clocks, baskets, drawings, paintings and much more. Items at arts and crafting stores can be made from scratch or can be in pre-packaged “tool kits.” For example, if you want to tie-dye a shirt you can buy the shirt and paint separately, or you can by a tie-dying kit, which includes everything plus directions to make the process easier for you. This means there are no excuses for not knowing how to be creative.
Recently, I was blown away by the creativity of my boyfriend who gave me pillowcases as a present. At first I was confused about why he would give me such a random gift. Then when I unfolded them I saw drawings done in fabric-marker on each pillowcase so I laid them out on the ground. The first pillowcase was a drawing of a stick-figure boy talking into a can tied to a string. The string flows to the end of the pillowcase and continues onto the second pillowcase and leads to a drawing of a stick-figure girl holding a can to her ear. My boyfriend and I have a long-distance relationship right now and talking on the phone at night before we go to sleep is a big ritual of ours. These pillowcases could not have symbolized our late-night “pillow-talk” conversations any better.
You see once you get the hang of thinking about your significant other in light of who they are inside, what their personality is and what their interests are, you will have a better eye for grabbing onto the things that have a lot of meaning in your relationship. Material items can be a nice gesture on occasion, but it is the time you put into what you give to your partner and the thought that counts much more than the price tag.
Constantly buying material goods like: clothing, jewelry, shoes, cars, etc. are all great presents, but at the end of the day--are any of those items necessary? Will you truly get satisfaction out of the latest Jessica Simpson heels from Nordstrom's that your boyfriend bought you for Valentine's Day? If your answer is yes, then you probably aren't interested in this blog.
Receiving inexpensive gifts from your partner doesn’t mean they love you any less. Perhaps the reason they buy you material goods in the first place is because they are too scared to get creative. Buying something that's already a finished product like clothing or jewelry is safe. Whereas creating something from scratch can be intimidating, especially if you are testing your "creative juices" for the first time.
But the beautiful thing about getting creative is that you are the inventor and no one can tell you what you've created is wrong.
A good place to start is by collecting memorabilia from your relationship. Think in terms of movie ticket stubs, pictures, programs from plays you’ve seen together and images that remind you of them. If your partner has ever been written about or photographed in a newspaper, those are also great items to collect. After you’ve gathered a substantial amount of items you’ll be able to organize a scrapbook filled with images that symbolize your partner. Anyone’s heart would melt if they saw how someone took so much time to put something like a scrapbook together.
If your partner loves to cook and experiment with food, search around the internet for quirky recipes that you think they would be interested in making and put together a personal cookbook.
You also can’t fail by going to a local arts and crafting store like A.C. Moore. There you can finds hundreds of crafty items from designing glass vases, t-shirts, wreaths, pictures, mirrors, clocks, baskets, drawings, paintings and much more. Items at arts and crafting stores can be made from scratch or can be in pre-packaged “tool kits.” For example, if you want to tie-dye a shirt you can buy the shirt and paint separately, or you can by a tie-dying kit, which includes everything plus directions to make the process easier for you. This means there are no excuses for not knowing how to be creative.
Recently, I was blown away by the creativity of my boyfriend who gave me pillowcases as a present. At first I was confused about why he would give me such a random gift. Then when I unfolded them I saw drawings done in fabric-marker on each pillowcase so I laid them out on the ground. The first pillowcase was a drawing of a stick-figure boy talking into a can tied to a string. The string flows to the end of the pillowcase and continues onto the second pillowcase and leads to a drawing of a stick-figure girl holding a can to her ear. My boyfriend and I have a long-distance relationship right now and talking on the phone at night before we go to sleep is a big ritual of ours. These pillowcases could not have symbolized our late-night “pillow-talk” conversations any better.
You see once you get the hang of thinking about your significant other in light of who they are inside, what their personality is and what their interests are, you will have a better eye for grabbing onto the things that have a lot of meaning in your relationship. Material items can be a nice gesture on occasion, but it is the time you put into what you give to your partner and the thought that counts much more than the price tag.
Friday, February 5, 2010
Put a Dent in Your Kitchen
Wait! Before you rush to the grocery store and stock up for this weekend's snowstorm, ask yourself, "Do I really need to buy more food, or is it that I just don’t want to eat the food I have plenty of?" Most likely the answer is yes. Yet you can find nearly everyone in town raiding the shelves of their local grocer every time the weatherman calls for a major storm.
Too many people spoil themselves nowadays with their fancy organic cereals, fruits, granola and poultry. The thought of finally opening that bland box of Corn Flakes that no one wants to eat (you know the one that’s been sitting on top of the refrigerator since November) sounds terrible. And what about those cans of soup that just rest in the cupboard? No thanks.
Rather than putting a dent in your wallet this weekend shopping for groceries before the storm, try putting a dent in your kitchen pantry instead.
Get creative! Look around for those boxes of pasta you know you have shoved in the back of a shelf and whip it together with one of your 10 jars of tomato sauce. Or dig into your stash of canned tuna and make a sandwich. If you have bread and cheese, take yourself back to childhood and make a comfort food like grilled cheese and compliment it with some warm Campbell’s Soup. There’s also no rule against eating breakfast for dinner, so make use of your “just add water” pancake mix, and waffles hidden behind your pricey Lean Cuisines, and voila—another meal. And if you really want to keep it simple, you can always have a yummy peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
There are countless ways to make use of the bulk items stored in your kitchen. In fact, the foods you forget to touch in your house are sometimes the most essential ones. It’s easy to get in the habit of going to the grocery store every week and purchasing expensive meat, Kashi cereal and fruits and vegetables that often go bad before they’re even eaten.
Of course there are certain products you need to purchase often like milk, eggs and butter. I’m not telling you to drink sour milk. All that I’m just suggesting is to be more resourceful.
So go scope out your kitchen. Think up some fun ways to make use of what you already have this weekend, but more importantly enjoy the cozy indoors and beautiful snow outside with your family and friends.
Too many people spoil themselves nowadays with their fancy organic cereals, fruits, granola and poultry. The thought of finally opening that bland box of Corn Flakes that no one wants to eat (you know the one that’s been sitting on top of the refrigerator since November) sounds terrible. And what about those cans of soup that just rest in the cupboard? No thanks.
Rather than putting a dent in your wallet this weekend shopping for groceries before the storm, try putting a dent in your kitchen pantry instead.
Get creative! Look around for those boxes of pasta you know you have shoved in the back of a shelf and whip it together with one of your 10 jars of tomato sauce. Or dig into your stash of canned tuna and make a sandwich. If you have bread and cheese, take yourself back to childhood and make a comfort food like grilled cheese and compliment it with some warm Campbell’s Soup. There’s also no rule against eating breakfast for dinner, so make use of your “just add water” pancake mix, and waffles hidden behind your pricey Lean Cuisines, and voila—another meal. And if you really want to keep it simple, you can always have a yummy peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
There are countless ways to make use of the bulk items stored in your kitchen. In fact, the foods you forget to touch in your house are sometimes the most essential ones. It’s easy to get in the habit of going to the grocery store every week and purchasing expensive meat, Kashi cereal and fruits and vegetables that often go bad before they’re even eaten.
Of course there are certain products you need to purchase often like milk, eggs and butter. I’m not telling you to drink sour milk. All that I’m just suggesting is to be more resourceful.
So go scope out your kitchen. Think up some fun ways to make use of what you already have this weekend, but more importantly enjoy the cozy indoors and beautiful snow outside with your family and friends.
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