Weekly summary, day 7

Since today was a gloriously spend-free day and I wanted a place to log more insights than a straight-forward spending post, I decided upon a weekly summary of expenses and lessons learned.

This week’s damage: $823.85
Biggest chunk of that: technology, in the form of an almost-600-dollar-phone…still leaves more than $200 on grocery/other spending, when my goal is to get to that figure for a month of groceries.
Lessons learned: there’s a lot of “other” in the aforementioned category. On Day 2 of this experiment, I created a spreadsheet to categorize actual items purchased, and discovered only about half of my “grocery” spending went toward actual comestibles. Notably, $20 (nearly 10%) went to “organization” and “décor” – a figure I could have likely guessed before tracking so closely, but now have glaring proof I need to rein in my domestic habits.

*Housekeeping note: for simplicity I’ll be focusing on non-recurring, discretionary and non-fixed (read: groceries) costs, since stuff like the mortgage is a predictable cost and accepted in my current and new budgets. I may occasionally post about a savings strategy for other fixed costs (cell phone, insurance, etc.) if I manage to negotiate something better in those areas.