Dance This Mess Around
It’s a lyric by the B52’s. It pretty much sums up how I’ve been feeling lately about my money. It’s just a big mess.
I moved my Save-O-Meter down. I pulled out $2000.00 for my car repair, my gift to my mom to repair her windows, and to pay down my credit cards. Fortunately, the Save-O-Meter balance was higher than the amount posted, which is why I still have 59% left, and not just 50%. It was sad to knock it down, but the money is going to a good purpose by doing this. I’ll build it back up.
My Debt-O-Meter finally moved. I made some progress on it at the expense of my Save-O-Meter. Hopefully I’ll be able to make a little more progress over the next few months. I am able to pay over $1200.00 a month to credit card debt, so the rest of 2007 should see some significant progress. I’ve done all the right things, moved things to 0% balance transfer cards, called to lower my rate, etc. Now I just have to pay them down.
As far as the notebook experiment goes, well, that was interesting. I’m glad I did it but I don’t think I really learned that much from it. The bigger thing was that I used a cash allowance and that really helped me put a lid on my spending. The notebook showed me that I dined out a lot. Big Deal. I already knew that.
Mighty Bargain Hunter writes about using The Force to do your budgeting. I have to admit that I fall into The Force category. It’s the lazy way to budget. Honestly, the best thing that I can do is to keep giving myself a cash allowance and say that’s it. That’s all you get to spend on dining out, on anything. Books, etc. It’s too easy for me to fork over my debit card when I want to buy a new book. But I hate watching the cash slip through my fingers.
As the weather warms up and cold lunches become more tolerable, I am going to try and stick to having sandwiches for lunch. My co-worker and I went to her apartment for lunch last week and instead of mustard, she told me to try the pesto spread. She said it reminds her of the chicken pesto sandwich at Panera, one of our favorites. Pesto is good stuff on turkey and I recommend everybody give it a try. We walk her dog at lunch time too so that makes for some nice exercise too.
Debt Hater wrote:
Your money isn’t a mess, you’re doing well!
And you don’t have to just have sandwiches for lunch (I tried it, got bored as all get out AND it wound up being more expensive than I anticipated). There’s lots of tasty, cheap, homemade lunch ideas. I save so much money and I’m never dissatisfied. If you want some, let me know!
Posted on 03-Apr-07 at 9:56 pm | Permalink
Mapgirl’s Fiscal Challenge / Moved My Meters wrote:
[…] realigning my Save-O-Meter and Debt-O-Meter a few months back, I have updated the figures to accurately reflect what I have in my accounts. I am happy to report […]
Posted on 08-Sep-08 at 7:36 am | Permalink