One Month Challenge: May 2009
I know I just did this for April but with the month having just ended it seemed like a perfect time plus you got to keep your eye on the ball – if I want 2 vacations this year and one of them possibly to Hawaii I need to watch the finances carefully.
For those of you who don’t know the game: open an excel file and put down every debit and credit card charge and group them into categories, total them and see where your money is going! The format below is category: % of monthly spending (change from last month).
Rent/Daycare/Medical: 38% (exactly the same)
Entertainment: 16% (up slightly)
Fast Food: 15% (wow, up by a third!)
Groceries: 12% (down by almost half!)
Transit & Politics: 5% (down slightly)
Dining Out: 5% (up slightly)
Gas & Gifts: 5% (down slightly)
Merchandise: 4% (complete increase)
So since my last challenge I wanted to cut down on grocery spending (and by that I mean not quantity but rather make sure I’m always getting a fair price) and fast food spending. Now granted I only had 4 days (or 13% of the month) to make any impact on that. Groceries dropped significantly both in percentage and dollars spent so at least I don’t feel quite so ripped off in that category however I let the side down on Fast Food. Fast Food saw a 50% increase in percentage, going from 10% last month to 15% this month as a percentage of total spending. Now I can explain some of this in that with Star Trek being in theatres I was eating at the movie theatre quite a bit more than average and that stuff isn’t cheap. Also it was the end of pizza Mondays and I decided to go out with a bit of a bang – Panago with extra cheese on everything. So Pizza Mondays are over for this year so that should make a significant impact on my Fast Food spending. As for eating at the movies that will probably stay up as Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen comes out this month and I still haven’t seen Terminator.
Entertainment is up slightly because of Star Trek being in theatres and The Original Series season one coming out on blu-ray and my susceptibility to peer pressure. Gas & Gifts may be down slightly but don’t let that mislead you, gas is most definitely up – it was the gift spending that dropped; we can probably expect this category to skyrocket this month due to gift giving and the seasonal increase in fuel prices. As for the Merchandise category, I bought myself new work shoes – they were on sale and are an essential even though I don’t quite need them yet I will eventually so better to buy them on sale as the shoes I require (Rockport, 8 wide) aren’t cheap.
So the big goal for June would be to cut down on the fast food spending primarily. I plan to achieve this by getting the cheaper subs at Subway for lunch (i.e. Roast Beef rather than Roasted Chicken), trying not to give in to the lazy convenience of fast food as often and make more meals at home, and I hope to get some major help by the end of Pizza Mondays. I suppose I should also make a small effort to curtail Entertainment spending but that shouldn’t be too hard – I have a free movie coming to me from my Scene points, there’s only one book out this month I want and it should cost about half that of the book I bought last month since it’s a regular paperback, and I’ve found recent blu-ray selection to be less than inspiring – so this category really should take care of itself.
