Adventures in Budgeting
(Is it lame that I want to be wearing a Thor hat right now?)
So I've been budgeting, lately. And okay, yes, I've always budgeted, because apparently I skipped proper irresponsible teenage- and young-adulthood entirely in favor of acting like I'm forty. I think 10 pm is a kick-ass bedtime. I have always considered drinking to get drunk to be the stupidest thing imaginable. And I fell out of college right into a detailed line item budget delineating exactly how much I could spend on what each week in order to still sock away a couple hundred bucks into my savings at the end of the month (which was handy when, for instance, my car decided its last transmission just wasn't good enough for it).
But this year I decided I was going to travel. "If I put away $500 a month," I thought to myself, "I can both afford to go to Japan and Brazil, and still manage to save enough to also reach a slightly lowered end-of-year savings goal!" (I had obviously gotten inexplicably cocky, about both my will power and my ability to avoid unexpected expenses like car repairs, the previous largest unexpected-expense culprit, which I have so far avoided this year by driving as little as possible and just not taking the damn thing in.)
Already this optimistic hypothesis has proven incorrect: I ended up taking some freelance work, which luckily covered my trip to Japan, and also kept me busy enough during the weekends that I didn't feel the need to go out and spend money.
I'm still on track to make it, if I scale down my Christmas presents a bit from what I usually buy (which sucks, because I really like buying Christmas presents, but I think my friends and family will survive) and don't break any bones or develop weird diseases (knock on wood). But that involves continuing this strangely monk-like lifestyle I'm currently living.
Now, okay, that's not fair. Mostly because I have this fabulous boyfriend who, like, buys me dinner and takes me to the rodeo (which, btw, was *awesome*) and stuff. But I've begun to show the signs of excessive non-shopping-- and I don't know how much longer I can hold out.
My weakness is clothes. I get enough of books at work, I'm sad to say, and any extracurricular reading I feel like doing, well, what else is my roommate's bookshelf for? (Plus, I'm still not through the books I picked up at BEA.) The Internet and fanmixes have soothed my music rumblings. I have work-related Netflix slots. I am totally happy with my six-year-old phone, even if it isn't totally happy at not yet being released to whereever it is that cell phones go to die, and while it'd be great to replace my eight-year-old Mac powerbook, it still word processes and gets the Internet fine, so who am I to complain? Clothes are the only thing I have to buy to get (I'm no seamstress, trust me on this). And I'm not allowed to have any.
I have pretty solid self-control, in general. But I've definitely verged into the area of excessive self-control, and that's a difficult thing to keep up. Once you let it have a little bit of reign, it wants to take over. I buy a pair of jeans, sheerly because I want a pair of jeans and not because my last pair fell apart and I actually do need some, and it feels so good I want to buy more. Not a lot more-- I could never, in good conscience, ever run up an unplanned clothing bill over a couple hundred dollars, and even that's really pushing it-- but, you know, maybe a cute top, and a pair of boots or something. And it kinda sucks that I can't.
It's hard to feel sorry for myself, though. Because I'm only "suffering" so I can go to Brazil, and see cool stuff, and sleep in, and eat, and hang out with the boyfriend. I believe Beth said it best when she wrote, "Awww, would you like some champagne and strawberries to go with that self-pity?"
And saying no to myself isn't, really, the hard part. The hard part is saying no to other people-- feeling justified in saying to someone who wants me to go out to dinner, or a movie, or to, oh, anything, "No, I choose not to afford it." Because that's the crux of it: I could afford to go out to dinner, I just can't afford to go out to dinner and go to Brazil, and I choose Brazil. It's my choice to make; it's just irritating and depressing to make it over and over and over again. To have to explain it's not a matter of not having the money until payday; it's a matter of not having the money period. I have a finite amount, and all of it has already been carefully parsed out.
And the less I spend, the more money I can manage *not* to spend on a day to day basis, the more I get to have available later . . . so I can shop in Brazil.
So I've been budgeting, lately. And okay, yes, I've always budgeted, because apparently I skipped proper irresponsible teenage- and young-adulthood entirely in favor of acting like I'm forty. I think 10 pm is a kick-ass bedtime. I have always considered drinking to get drunk to be the stupidest thing imaginable. And I fell out of college right into a detailed line item budget delineating exactly how much I could spend on what each week in order to still sock away a couple hundred bucks into my savings at the end of the month (which was handy when, for instance, my car decided its last transmission just wasn't good enough for it).
But this year I decided I was going to travel. "If I put away $500 a month," I thought to myself, "I can both afford to go to Japan and Brazil, and still manage to save enough to also reach a slightly lowered end-of-year savings goal!" (I had obviously gotten inexplicably cocky, about both my will power and my ability to avoid unexpected expenses like car repairs, the previous largest unexpected-expense culprit, which I have so far avoided this year by driving as little as possible and just not taking the damn thing in.)
Already this optimistic hypothesis has proven incorrect: I ended up taking some freelance work, which luckily covered my trip to Japan, and also kept me busy enough during the weekends that I didn't feel the need to go out and spend money.
I'm still on track to make it, if I scale down my Christmas presents a bit from what I usually buy (which sucks, because I really like buying Christmas presents, but I think my friends and family will survive) and don't break any bones or develop weird diseases (knock on wood). But that involves continuing this strangely monk-like lifestyle I'm currently living.
Now, okay, that's not fair. Mostly because I have this fabulous boyfriend who, like, buys me dinner and takes me to the rodeo (which, btw, was *awesome*) and stuff. But I've begun to show the signs of excessive non-shopping-- and I don't know how much longer I can hold out.
My weakness is clothes. I get enough of books at work, I'm sad to say, and any extracurricular reading I feel like doing, well, what else is my roommate's bookshelf for? (Plus, I'm still not through the books I picked up at BEA.) The Internet and fanmixes have soothed my music rumblings. I have work-related Netflix slots. I am totally happy with my six-year-old phone, even if it isn't totally happy at not yet being released to whereever it is that cell phones go to die, and while it'd be great to replace my eight-year-old Mac powerbook, it still word processes and gets the Internet fine, so who am I to complain? Clothes are the only thing I have to buy to get (I'm no seamstress, trust me on this). And I'm not allowed to have any.
I have pretty solid self-control, in general. But I've definitely verged into the area of excessive self-control, and that's a difficult thing to keep up. Once you let it have a little bit of reign, it wants to take over. I buy a pair of jeans, sheerly because I want a pair of jeans and not because my last pair fell apart and I actually do need some, and it feels so good I want to buy more. Not a lot more-- I could never, in good conscience, ever run up an unplanned clothing bill over a couple hundred dollars, and even that's really pushing it-- but, you know, maybe a cute top, and a pair of boots or something. And it kinda sucks that I can't.
It's hard to feel sorry for myself, though. Because I'm only "suffering" so I can go to Brazil, and see cool stuff, and sleep in, and eat, and hang out with the boyfriend. I believe Beth said it best when she wrote, "Awww, would you like some champagne and strawberries to go with that self-pity?"
And saying no to myself isn't, really, the hard part. The hard part is saying no to other people-- feeling justified in saying to someone who wants me to go out to dinner, or a movie, or to, oh, anything, "No, I choose not to afford it." Because that's the crux of it: I could afford to go out to dinner, I just can't afford to go out to dinner and go to Brazil, and I choose Brazil. It's my choice to make; it's just irritating and depressing to make it over and over and over again. To have to explain it's not a matter of not having the money until payday; it's a matter of not having the money period. I have a finite amount, and all of it has already been carefully parsed out.
And the less I spend, the more money I can manage *not* to spend on a day to day basis, the more I get to have available later . . . so I can shop in Brazil.