Ah, early May… how little I knew then. All I worried about was a pandemic – securing toilet paper and groceries, masks and soap. This update is later than I’d intended because writing about personal finance from the perspective of a white middle-class woman seemed so tone deaf over the past couple weeks. Not only
Analysis this morning showed May-August 2018 (start of this site) as my lowest spending/highest savings period yet… but that is about to change. My April spending came in 11% under that period’s average (and 30% below my 3-year average!), largely thanks to some quarantine-imposed restrictions. I am hoping to keep that momentum going by getting
So wow, right? It’s been a couple years since I published anything here… even forgot whether this blog uses first person; think I dabbled with third person “The Agent” at some point, heh. I tend to focus on silly nit-picky things (like first vs third person) as a response to stress, and hoo-boy is there
Just under 70 bucks on groceries this week, woot! However, I spent almost $15 on “décor” – a habit I thought I’d kicked. More convinced every time I visit Tarzhey that the mere two-letter difference between “Opal House” and “Poor House” is -not- a coincidence 😐 Time to accept my transgression and get back on track
$123.70 this week on groceries – leading me to bump up the monthly budget to $500 (this should also help normalize things in 5-week months like August). That’s still about half what I was spending a couple months ago, and I’ve found other ways to decrease spending without making a noticeable dent in lifestyle, so
New format, same concept. Total spending this week: $106.77 – just a tiny bit up from last week, and a reasonable $68.32 of that went towards actual groceries. “Whoa” moments: -Nearly 80% of the “grocery” spending actually went towards a big ol’ vino restock ($53.96)…turns out the bulk shopping in April and May paid off
As the first full month of my experiment comes to a close, let’s talk discretionary spending – by which I mean “variable costs” as opposed to purely non-essential purchases. Today I downloaded all of April and May’s purchase history from Mint and filtered out fixed costs/the basics (stuff I do not include in my tracking on here
Groceries totaled $106.41 this week, which looks like a “whoa, lowest total yet” – but it’s artificially low for a couple reasons. First, the Agent has been on staycation this week, so while I have still been making most meals at home, I’ve blown May’s restaurant budget in the past week alone. On top of
In the past week I have parted with $141.71, almost 42% more that I had intended… well, that’s not strictly true. I did purchase a shoe rack intentionally – the jumble of shoes jammed into a large brown paper bag in the coat closet just wasn’t working anymore. With spring weather so unpredictable, it’s really,
Closest week to goal so far! $117.31, and $25 of that went to donations (non-perishable food drive in the neighborhood – made a quick TJs run to supplement what we already had lounging in the cupboards). Total grocery spending came in under the $100 weekly budget, and even included a couple health and household items