I caved and used my debit card and am now $1.82 over budget for the week. I spent a few bucks more than I'd planned on groceries on Sunday, bought one fast food lunch (I know, I know, bad E.C. !), and then my parents came to visit so I needed more food for them. My budget would have withstood the stress if I hadn't needed batteries for my camera for graduation as well. My dad offered to buy the food I got for dinner when we went to the store together, but I couldn't allow that.
I'm still tweaking my weekly cash allowance. $100 was a very comfortable amount, but the past couple of weeks I've been trying to do $80 instead, which works reasonably well on the weeks when I don't try to go out and do anything that costs money but is fairly tight the rest of the time. Twenty bucks a week doesn't seem like a big deal, but it's a lot over the course of a year. Thoughts?
I'm a somewhat geeky physics enthusiast hoping to be a not-so-broke grad student as I return to school after TFA.
About Me
Rants and Musings
Some blogs I like
Blog Archive
-
▼
2009
(80)
-
▼
May
(11)
- I'm done with my first year of teaching. Oh, and I...
- A confession
- The end is near.
- I miss the Scirocco.
- Great news: I'm not qualified for a job I don't want!
- I'm going to go spend my very last dime on a bean ...
- Maybe I am a masochist after all.
- I know it was my money all along...
- My cell phone is dying a slow death.
- Now my roommate is talking about buying a house! (...
- "You're halfway to being married," he guffawed.
-
▼
May
(11)
5 comments:
This past year I invested in a batter charger and two sets of 4 AA batteries (which are what my camera takes). These get traded in and out of my camera at need (and they are pretty good in terms of how long they last) and I no longer buy batteries. I have not actually calculated how many uses until the batteries pay for themselves, but I would guess (given the price of good batteries or the quantity of crappy batteries I would need) that I am already on the plus side of the equation.
Oops, battery charger, not batter. ;-)
If 80 works most of the time, I'd say try to stick with that… but life happens, and you shouldn't always shortchange yourself. Maybe if you had an extra 20 on hand, you could use it when you wanted. If it only happens a couple times a year, than it's not a huge deal.
I am pathologically frugal, but PLEASE cut yourself some slack. And let your parents buy you the occasional treat!
I'm about to go from a full-time paying job to less than half of that (plus loans) in grad school, and to me, $80 seems like such a small amount of money! I'm really nervous about adjusting my spending habits so dramatically but I hope to learn something from you and the other frugal bloggers so I too don't have to live on ramen.
Post a Comment