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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

Comments

[teefers]

blarg, I feel you so hard on the shopping thing. I've managed to slow my role with the clothes-buying, and I've even given away a significant amount of clothing to friends with smaller wardrobes... but then I go and buy another pinball table. hahah, fail. it's not beyond my means but did I really NEED it? probably not... but is it fun? fuck yes.

[flamingophoenix]

When my mom worked as a budget counselor, she advised people to write everything down. An app is a great idea. (Her low-tech solution was to have people keep a piece of paper wrapped around their credit card and/or cash, depending on which they used, and to also have a pen handy.)

The month challenge is a great idea! You could even do a modified "no buy" thing, where for stuff like FRFF you set a budget, and only allow yourself to buy within the budget - if you hit your limit, too bad, you can't buy X item, kind of thing.

But yeah, even starting by writing everything down is a great start! Good luck!

Other examples/suggestions here.

[deepseasiren]

It's funny you mentioned wanting to keep a food diary because I need to do that. It really helps to see in print what you have eaten.

[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

[sillygoosegirl]

I use Mint also. Though it goes into my accounts for me and downloads transactions, so in some ways it is not as effective as writing stuff down... at least not in the sense that the writing down exercise causes less spending. However, it does give you the chance to review what you've spent and think about it. And you can record your cash transactions in the app. You can also compare how much you record in cash transaction with how much you are withdrawing in cash... So it's harder to "cheat."