Do you have what it takes to geek out for a minute, or a few hours, and dig down deep as to why you’re looking at the bank wondering where the fuck did your money disappear to? My mother always told me that I’m an Aries, so I would always suck at managing money. Well, I think that’s a shitty outlook, no?
Instead, I like to think that I could use a little information–a report card on how I spent my money to make myself better. See, the way I look at things, knowing where I fucked up can quickly boot my ass in the direction I need to go. An Automatic-Ass-Kicking compass.
I have to jump aside here to explain to all of you who haven’t paid attention to my habits. What happens is I get excited about something–a project, book, story, game–whatever. I throw all my energy into it, I furiously keep at it, until the shiny wears off, I lose interest, and voila! Another one gathers dust. (That WAS sung to Another One Bites the Dust.) I would like to keep on this task.
I have an Excel sheet with all twenty six pay periods, everything linked together, where I “budgeted” my paycheck into “wallets”, then entered in my transactions as expenses, taking them from the wallets–as if I were taking the money out of a physical one, then adjusted the wallets at the end of the spending period to bring any negative number to zero. After all, if there’s no money to pay for it, then you can’t buy it, you have to “borrow” the money from somewhere else. With that history, I should be able to either a) finally budget the CORRECT amount in my wallets per pay or b) really examine IF I want to continue spending like that in that category, or lower the amount and put the surplus somewhere else.
Naturally this got me to thinking: How much did I spend over the last thirteen pay periods (like the dutifully geek I am, I am of course taking a hard look at last year’s pay periods. An audit, of sorts. God, I must be a loser. Anyway, I just found out that I pulled the same shit last year.) verses what I could have paid down on my DEBTS? (Fucking D-Word. Great.)
I budgeted $40 per pay period, so times that by thirteen pay periods and that should give us $520. Not too bad. So, how much did I actually spend in that time? 2411.81$ Holy shit. Some quick, eyeball peeling logic/math leaves me with this:
I know, it’s not just the 520$ knocked off the amount. Instead, I wanted to see what the average would be if I had actually budgeted for it. While the real number is only slightly more, the thing is that I could have put this towards my debt, an emergency fund. Hell, I could have bought VR equipment!
So, yeah, a good way to see where you’re going. I’m hoping a little geekery goes a long way to see this thing to the end. Can I keep interested in it for long enough?
That’s my Mad Late Night Musing for tonight.