So, every Saturday morning I have a ritual. I open a spreadsheet I created about five years ago and start entering data on all my investments and debt.
It's quite the eye-opening experience. Luckily, I have a notes field to explain what some of the expenditures that week. This is a purposeful exercise and though a lot of my life is automatic, I prefer to keep doing this exercise. It is the one activity that forces me to capture a snapshot of where I'm at every week and it reduces the amount of money that I spend on my one spare day of the week (Saturday). After all, it's really hard to be tempted to buy even groceries on Saturday when the morning starts out with reality staring at me in the face.
This morning was quite the eye-opener. After logging into all my accounts, I realized that my mortgage, my six month car insurance bill, my yearly life insurance bill, two credit card payments, tithing and home insurance all hit me this week!
The pro is that it all happened electronically without me having to worry about a thing. The con is that I hadn't been tracking exactly when these automatic yearly payments would hit me. Thank goodness for having a job for continual money flow and for overdraft line of credits. This too shall pass.
Ah well, this means that this Saturday will be even more realistic. No need to grocery shop when I've got some food storage to use and the gas tank is already full.
There is some good coming out of this bad economy - we are all becoming a little more savvy on the money management side of things.
Now, on to logging the investments which have turned into a bad gamble at this point.
1 comment:
I feel your pain. April was a rather expensive month for me! In addition to the regular budgeted expenses of life, I had property tax (in TWO states- since Virginia, where I haven't lived in 2 years, was threatening to take me to court over property taxes I still don't think I should have to pay), state income tax (my employer doesn't take those out on us), first time insurance payments, a bunch of travel expenses for work that have not yet been reimbursed, 2 traffic tickets, car inspection (had to get a new windshield and tires), and some other annoying things. All in all? $2,160 of unexpected or "one-time" expenses. OUCH!
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