money

For the last week or so, I've been thinking a lot about money. Money is a resource that I have to use as I want, and I frequently forget that it is MY resource and MY CHOICE how to use that resource. I've been feeling tight and controlled by money issues lately, and maybe some of that is legit since there was that whole ugly snafu with the evil former leeches living in my house. But I still have choices.

I got a great idea from my girl dol who said that she categorizes all food expenses together (groceries, eating out, even those cups of coffee she buys). And all the food expenses together have a budget--here's how much I spend a week. If I eat out a lot, I have less for groceries. If I buy a lot of fancy high-end items at the grocery store, I have less for going to get coffee out.

I've used Quicken since I was a freshman in college, and I love it. It is a tool my Dad encouraged me to use. It is great, because it is a way of tracking expenses, it can make graphs and charts and pull summaries of data for you. Even with this amazing tool at my disposal, I am terrible at budgeting. I hate it. I hate trying to track a bazillion little categories of expenditures in my head as I spend money. So I don't do it, and spend money mindlessly. So I took a look at the last few months and was SHOCKED to find out how much money I've been spending on food every month. I knew it was going to be high, but not that much.

So all the various things I've been saying I can't afford to do, or the things that I want to save for, etc. I have the choice to continue to spend haphazardly on food, or become more aware, more awake and choose to do something different. So I'm choosing to do something different and give myself a guideline of an amount I'd like to try not to exceed each week. I decided that my week starts Saturday morning, and ends Friday night. This helps split up weekend going out, and fits along with the work-week, too.

This week I did ok, especially since I didn't do this money figuring until part-way through the week. I went a little over, but not by much, and I feel good about the choices I made.

I debated a lot about putting actual numbers in here, and I'm not afraid to share that if people are interested. I decided not to, as a way to not get caught up. The real learning here is about choice and putting my resources where my values are.