Penny Pincher

I've gone through several various phases of budgeting money, but now I need to seriously go lean and mean.  I have a plan and it must cover my expenses for an entire year with no income.*

First, prior to leaving college I did absolutely no financial tracking.  Immediately afterwards I ended up as a contractor to Microsoft through Volt and the paychecks seemed to provide an endless fount of cash.  Initially I continued to do no balancing of the checkbook and ended up getting hit by several $35 charges by WAMU when I overstepped my account limit.  From then until the end of my stint at Microsoft (which took me full-time for 3 months before I quit!), I spent more cautiously by checking my balance constantly and still not making any plans or writing anything down.

Next I went to a system of throwing receipts in a box (seriously) and putting bills in folders.  This had the unintended side effect of massive amounts of maintenance via spikes of time sinks sorting through it all.  I started a notebook where I wrote every transaction down and that held me over, but also took more time than I wanted.  I tried Microsoft Money, but it felt cumbersome and desired too much of my time (that and being locked down to one computer limited its usefulness).

Another drought of interest in the topic left a sizeable gap in my financial history.  In order to simply ignore all the information I had amassed previously, I took all the folders full of bills and paystubs, sealed them in a big cardbox, and tossed it in storage where I wouldn't have to look at it.  Then I quit my salary job and the need to properly calculate income versus expenses became painfully obvious.  Also at the same time I hit upon what has become my sweet spot: Google Docs and Pixily.

What I do now is have a single spreadsheet that counts for an entire year.  There are very simple columns for item, income, expense, type, and description.  Next year I think I'll even get rid of type (finding I waste time trying to categorize what doesn't need to be immediately categorized).  Cell calculations at the bottom allow me to observe the general amounts for preserving my sanity.  And Pixily is a service which stores your paper crap digitally and shreds it in an environmentally friendly manner; it's a reverse-NetFlix in that you get an empty envelope mailed to you, which you then stuff with all manner of paper (I've put in everything from tiny receipts to over-long contracts), and then send back.

However, I still have a box for receipts which I periodically empty and it's more of a chore than I want to deal with.  I don't like spending any time on money itself, because it just feels like a really dumb way to waste life (unless it's your job and/or you enjoy it).  Additionally this next year I'm "taking off" to build a game to enter into the Independent Games Festival.  In order to make sure I can do this, I have plotted out my monthly expenses.  It will require even more attention to budgeting so that I can feel safe for a fixed period of time, because I need to spend that time designing / developing and not panicking.

My new plan is to separate petty expenses so that I don't even have to track them in my spreadsheet.  The idea is to take out a cash allowance at the beginning of the month and use that exclusively for all daily and recreational perks that are wants and not needs.  Thus far I intend to try $10 a day, get it in bills of the same size, and put that in a box.  I'll fill it monthly but only if the amount in the box is less than the $300'ish I'd be withdrawing.  Hopefully it inspires frugality when I can see a tangible, dwindling supply.  Whenever I go out for coffee, to eat, or drink with friends, I'll take out spending money and later I'll put the receipts back in the box.  These are meant to represent reminders and won't be something I sift through for accounting purposes.

The other side of my plan is to actually buy groceries and make food at home rather than always going out to eat.  This is not something I've had to do for a long time so I anticipate difficulty.  I reasoned that spending money on my belly is basically worthless when I could just use it to have fun with friends.  As that quote in Into the Wild says: "Happiness is only real when shared".


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* I do make a paltry sum off Google AdSense, affiliates, and interest but it isn't enough for me to consider counting it.  Instead, it's more like tiny bonuses.