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[jianantonic]

McKenzie and I had a little talk about money this afternoon. I wrote before (in a locked entry) that our finances are fine, but we'd like to be saving more, and also neither of us can realistically expect to ever make significantly more in our jobs. The cold, hard truth is that the most realistic way for us to make an impact right now is for me to

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[thejagster10]

I use a program called Mint to obsessively track everything that I spend (I'm working on paying off a gazillion dollars in student loans), and I've found that it really helps - you can set budgets for different categories. I found that I was spending more than I thought on lunch out with my work people, so it gave me a cutoff point in the month to just say that I didn't have extra lunch money left for the month, and really prioritize which lunches I wanted to go to enough to spend a bigger part of my out-to-lunch budget on. ($10 left and a week left in the month - mildly entertaining lunch with work people, or going out for happy hour on Friday?!)

It also has an app for my phone, which makes it really easy to both characterize transactions (you have to do a lot manually at first, but then it gets pretty good at being more automatic), and seeing the little bar graph of how my budgets were doing. I could also check my phone from my desk to see how much of my monthly budget for that category I had already used. I also really like it because I can see my assorted debt/bank accounts/credit cards, etc all in one place, because I know it weirds some people out to have everything linked, but it really worked for me! Also, I get an enjoyable amount of pleasure tracking my financial "goals" that I have set in the system and watching my progress.

For me, I don't think a cold turkey approach would work - it would be like trying to avoid sweets for a week, and then I'd just eat a whole pan of brownies at the end!