Week 11 Budget Assessment
By Matt - Monday, August 11th, 2008
This past week has been a great week for me since I was able to not only pay all of my bills on time and get caught up on a few things that have been lagging but I was also able to stay below budget. The best part is that i was able to stay 10.8% below budget. This is a significant amount and here are the numbers:
| Weekly Budget Aug 4-10 |
||
| Budget | Actual | |
| Alcohol | $25.00 | $17/50 |
| Food-Lunch | $15.00 | $4.66 |
| Food | $100.00 | $128.28 |
| Gas | $0.00 | $16.01 |
| Entertainment | $0.00 | |
| Smokes | $30.00 | $24.10 |
| Misc | $50.00 | $0.00 |
| Transportation | $190.00 | $175.21 |
| Total | $410.00 | 365.76 |
I made a concerted effort to bring my lunch which translated to only spending 4.66 on lunch this week. This is one of the categories that I’ve really made an effort to keep tabs on since its extremely easy to pop out for lunch spend $10 rather than taking 10 minutes to bring lunch from home. I know that this is part of the way I got into debt and stayed there. With a little effort I’ve been able to keep my food spending in check and this week is a perfect example of this.
I did end up spending more money on food but this is being tempered by my not dpending any money on miscellaneous items. This was a bit of a trade off with my wife; she spent a bit of extra money on what I’d consider a miscellaneous expense so I spent a bit of extra money on food.
The biggest expense this week was paying for my parking and as it turned out I wasn’t able to buy a 6 month street parking pass since it’s close to the end of the year. I ended up only spending $44.60 rather than the $60 I was expecting. I’m glad that I finally managed to get the parking pass taken care of since continuing to pay for weekly passes amounts to nothing more than stupid spending (and the parking tickets are even stupider).
Other than this I was able to keep my smoking and alcohol costs down a bit which I’m happy about and it’s nice to know that I am actually in control of these items. I might have been able to cut back on these a bit more but I’m still happy because both were under budget.
Overall I’m incredibly happy with my results this week. I’ve never been this far below my budget and I’ve paid for parking till November reducing a regular weekly cost for me.
This entry is filed under Budgeting and Planning.
2 Responses to “Week 11 Budget Assessment”
1 Debbie says:
August 17th, 2008
at 11:59 am
Hey… I’m sure you’ve thought of this but since you seem to be very dedicated to ending what you call “stupid spending” and getting yourself out of debt…
You can shave $55 a week off your budget right off the bat by quitting smoking and skipping the alcohol- two completely unnecessary expenses. $55 a week is $220 a month… or maybe you can look at it as a week’s worth of your really high transportation costs covered. Or maybe, you could give yourself a little money in the “entertainment” budget each week because speaking from experience, all work and no play is never the solution!
Not only will ending the smoking/alcohol habits give you $220 extra a month in your budget, but you’ll become healthier and in terms of long-term results, you’ll probably spend less on healthcare later on (when the smoking/alcohol use catches up to you)
I like a drink every now and then, don’t get me wrong. Just saying if you spend money on it each and every week, it seems like a good place to trim off some of the unnecessary spending.
2 Matt says:
August 19th, 2008
at 2:16 pm
Debbie – I’ve been thinking about those two categories and maybe getting rid of them for a little while. Its often easier said than done though. As for the transportation costs they were only high this week; normally they’re a lot less.
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