Budgeting

I took the advice of Anonymous and downloaded PearBudget, a spreadsheet designed to help you make budgets and track expenditures. I never thought keeping a budget could be so fun! And I have no idea why it actually is fun, but it is. PearBudget has you break your expenditures into sub-categories under variable expenses (like groceries and entertainment), regular expenses (like rent), and irregular expenses (like gifts, vacations, or one-time big purchases). You can make the sub-categories anything you want them to be. I found that thinking about expenditures in terms of whether they're variable, regular, and irregular was really helpful in considering where it would actually make sense to cut back.

I haven't come to any major conclusions about my spending just yet. In January I spent about $80 on groceries and about $250 at restaurants. I thought this might be a sign I should cut back on dining out and cook more, until it was pointed out to me that I'm still spending less than $11 per day on food (seems pretty reasonable for the Bay Area). For now, I guess it's enough to have an understanding of where my money actually goes coming into focus.

Maybe that career in accounting isn't quite as hopeless as I thought.