WBRFS # 5

Bang! Right to the Weekly Budget Ronin Financial Showdown!

Showdown!
Budget Ronin vs. the Crushing Fear of Unseen Expenses!
"From out of the Darkness, razor-sharp receipts! Beware the papercuts, Ronin!"

This is still a tough time for us. Despite the deluge of great news about our debt and car loan, we still don't have money. Just resolving the debt wasn't like winning the lottery as far as our bank account was concerned. So we've still had to be very careful, even though I can tell the mood between Naginata and I regarding our finances is markedly different. We're very excited at the prospect of making progress instead of just filling holes that seemed relatively bottomless.

As part of the changes going on around our house and blog, I'm going to stop blogging my receipts. Taking my last Showdown to heart, I'm going to start planning for a monthly budget report instead. I've done a good job at curbing impulse shopping (all shopping really) and I think the previous half-year (177 days to be precise, but still, pretty darn close) has strengthened my resolve quite a bit. I think at this point, reading that I spent $2 on bananas or 10 quatloos on tribble food. Yeah. You thought my quatloo jokes were done, didn't you?

Anyway, obscure fictional science-fiction currency aside, I am going to start working on a monthly analysis that tells us more of an over/under of where we are hitting on our percentages for the month and year. I kind of screwed the pooch on some receipts for the last few weeks, so I won't be doing October, but November and December still give me ample time to ramp up for our first new year of non-car/non-credit card budgeting. I'll probably try some formats and names out just to see what looks good visually.

So sometime in the next couple of weeks between now and All Hallows Eve, I'm going to try and do some number crunching with Budget Naginata and see where we want to put down our numbers. It's like projecting for the next fiscal year, which is all business-like and far too grown up for my own tastes. Regardless, it's a positive first step and while I don't really want to run our household like a business, projecting a profit for the Budget Clan's 2008 fiscal year is an altogether new and giddy experience that I want to be a part of. I think I might have t-shirts made or something. Let's see the Gamemasters of Triskelion beat that!

Further updates from the Budget Clan?

We still have not sold/unloaded the hot-tub. We're thinking about just giving it away at a loss. Now that the extra couple of hundred does not seem an insurmountable loss, I'm inclined just to reclaim the deck space and my sanity.

Our first credit-card refund has arrive and been deposited. Our second is en route. Our last credit-card disbursement has been paid. I have to verify with the creditor it has bee received, but I'm pretty sure this clears us on all the cards.

Our Budget-Mobile is still slated to be paid off by the end of the year. Yay!

Budget Naginata and I are looking to move banks from Spank of America to something else. Recommendations and/or advice are welcome. Something online would be fine, but we would like someplace we can physically make deposits instead of having to mail anything in.

Well, that's it. Showdown is on time and I am off to work on pie charts... or maybe just some pie.

Compounding intrest daily,

B.R.

Short post, long weekend.

It was a busy holiday weekend. One of Naginata's younger brother's graduated from High School, so we packed up the Budget-mobile and went to celebrate. There was much festivity and we ended up dropping a little bit of cash in related expenses:

$8.99 camera battery
$2.49 card
$2.49 card
$7.99 gift

$23.50 total on what I would consider the first real non-essential items I've bought since the contest started. But graduation only happens once, so I don't feel bad about it at all. We would have easily dropped a larger sum on a gift if we hadn't tapped the bank already. We are waiting for my next check, reminding us once again about spending and saving and why we're on this crazy trip to begin with.

the daily spend 5-16 & 5-17

Just a few items but 2 of the same one. We have said before that we are leaving Edemame out of a lot of our restrictions. Budget Ronin works right next door to a *bucks (blegh but that's a post for another day.) There is a parking deck to his building but it costs $8 (!!!! I could buy some freaking GRAPES for gods sake.) to park there. So when we go downtown to see him we usually pop in at the *bucks and grab a coffee and then cross the street to his office. Now of course we are not buying the coffee but Edemame has no real restriction. I do want to change attitudes and habits with this experiment and we have not been visiting any coffee houses since it started, but Edemame asks to go to the "coffee shop" ALL the time, showing you just what a part of our lives it was. SO, all that to say that I am still occasionally buying her the odd "coffee" (steamed milk with vanilla). It's cheaper than paying $8 for a parking space and still a nice treat at roughly $1 for her.
Wow, defensive much?? :) On to the numbers...

5-16-07
Haircut for Edemame
total = $21.55
Coffee for Edemame @ *bucks
total = $1.03

5-17-07
Coffee for Edemame @ *bucks
total = $1.03

been a long time gone! the daily spend 5-10 - 5-15 edition

Hey guys!
I've been absent the past couple of days, lots of family and personal disruption so I'll get right to the bare bones of it and hopefully get back into the swing of things.

I actually haven't spent much the past few days but here it is for the record:
5-10-07
Citgo:
$12.03 fuel

5-11-07
BJs:
$25.01 fuel

Costco:
64oz of Strawberries
16oz of Blackberries
total = $11.31
We ended up there and the fruit was so good I couldn't pass it up. We have really enjoyed it all this weekend.

Thrift Store:
Pillow .50
total .52

I needed stuffing to fill the dolls I was making and I was pretty happy with myself for finding a pillow at the thrift store for less than a $1 when a bag of polyfil would set me back $1.35. I know it doesn't sound like much but when you add in the fact that the thrift store is within walking distance of my house and I'd have to drive 15 miles to the nearest Michael's to buy a bag, I saved some gas money there. And as you can see above, I need to save that gas money!!

5-13-07
.73 for a QT drink that I got to mix myself. (for the record: 1/2 Fanta Strawberry, 1/2 Squirt + 2 shots of Fountain Vanilla = YUM!) For me this is a ton of fun for almost no cash so Ronin and I agreed that it was OK.

I did end up making 2 dolls for birthday presents for Saturday. It was a LOT of work but it was fun making them and the girls really loved them. For Mother's Day it was hand drawn cards by Edemame for each Grandma and we had done some photo books on QOOP from our Flickr stream earlier in the year for this express purpose. So the cost of the books doesn't count against our experiment since I bought them in February. Though frankly they only cost $5.95 each and BOTH Grandma's cried so I guess you could say they were cheap at any price. ;)

the daily spend 5-9-07

Today was grocery day here at the Budget household. I have forgotten to get orange juice for the last 2 trips to the store and Edemame was insistent that we HAVE TO HAVE SOME. So off to the store we went. Obviously I needed other things but it's nice that Edemame got to think it was all HER idea. :)
Items marked (nol) are "Not On List". I always make a list before I go to the store to minimize problems with "Now what did I need?" type mistakes. My list always includes estimated prices (and frankly, I'm pretty spot on since I do the majority of the grocery shopping) and my total before I went to the store was $56. Tonight I neglected to put food for our cookout dinner on the list but I went ahead and bought it anyway and I was STILL under budget. 'Cause that's how I roll y'all.

ETA: In the sense of all fairness I have to say that I put the big thing of cat food on my list: $14 and I actually bought the smaller one: $8 so much of my under budgetness was because of that.

Publix:
Potato Chips: $2 (nol)
Hamburger Buns: $2 (nol)
Hot Dog Buns: $2 (nol)
Turkey Franks: $2 (nol)
(I feel like that kid in Better Off Dead, "TWO DOLLARS!")
Ground Beef: $4
Ground Chicken: $3
(4)Diced Tomatoes: $$2
Orange Juice: $4
Colby Jack Cheese: $2 (nol)
(2)Butter: $5
(2) Milk: $5
Oil: $3
Cat Food: $8
Cat Litter: $9
Total = $53.82

A lot of hot water...

So, in the spirit of keeping with the Naginata, I'm listing $26.37 for gas for my truck and about $15 for fuses for our fusebox. Yes, our house is old enough to have a fusebox. I blew them after hooking back up our hot tub in order to test it before selling it. Here's the story on that...

Naginata and I have been working on cleaning, streamlining and fixing up the house. It's a good pursuit, and there is plenty to keep us busy since we've decided to curtail extraneous consumption. It's a nice change of focus to make us thankful for what we already have and to give us the chance to get it in better shape. I have complained for some time that it feels like we "don't have anything," when in fact we're quite blessed to have a lot. It's time to take stock of it and leverage things we don't need/use in productive ways.

Out hot tub came with the house. We've used it only a handful of times. In fact, it has been drained empty for the better part of two years, now, and it occurred to me that we could sell it for some extra income and to help us in the clean up of our house. But before we can sell it, I wanted to make sure it worked, so I filled it back up and ran the system overnight. I figured if it was in good condition, we could make a fair amount off of the sale.

Well, we had arranged some of our appliances differently since we last ran the tub, so the resulting addition of 30+ amps to that circuit blew out the fuse. I went through two before I realized what was going on. I unplugged some things and got it back on, but we had to get some new fuses to replace those lost in the line of duty. The next morning, even though the system looks to be running, we still don't have warm water. We look at the options of either repairing the motor and sell the full working system (which we think will still net us a better price, even though we would have to invest something up front) or we sell it as is and expect to recoup less. We decide that the small hassle is better for more money. We also discuss putting a ceiling on how much we think its worth to repair vs. how much we think it's worth to junk and just sell the tub. It's not worth our time to repair the motor for 50-60% of our total asking price when the remaining 40% is what we'd sell the broken tub for anyway. But a repair that's 10-20% would give us a better price and overall improve our cash return.

The repairman now has our motor and is supposed to return an estimate soon. I'm planning on calling him in a bit to see if it is worth our money. Naginata and I talked about what this means and ways that we should look at income like this. We don't have a stack of hot tubs to sell, so we shouldn't expect this as steady income. In the past we would have split it up and had fun with it. We probably would have eaten a lot of take out or go to a few good restaurants. Under our new, self-imposed restrictions, those options are off the table, making us really examine how money like this should be best applied.

We came up with home repair. There are a couple of things that we need fixed around the house that require the touch of a professional. Assuming we can come close to what we're looking to list the tub for, it would give us more than enough to get that fixed up. This is the kind of thing we should have been doing all along. If we had figured out a better savings schema, we wouldn't have had to sell our hot tub just to get these things fixed. Mind you, we don't need the tub. We're selling it because we don't need it. The cash is an exceptionally nice fringe benefit that lets us do things we should have been responsible enough to tackle anyways.

I may sound like a broken record, but I say these things because I need to reinforce in my own mind that it shouldn't take selling off my possessions at a fraction of cost to supplement my income. We have the resources already, we just manage them badly. Inasmuch as I'd like to save as much money as possible between now and next Mayday, I'm taking this time to rewire my brain into handling this money better when it is given to me the first time around. I'm going to go back to the food analogy I started way back when. I read something this week that talked about not using exercise as either a punishment or reward for food you had eaten recently. I'd like to draw the parallel back to finance. I don't think the budget or the budgetary restriction should be viewed like a punishment. When you do that, you tend to see temporary cash gains as a means to grant yourself with a reward. But once you've sold the hot tub and spent the cash on comic books and penny whistles, what have you gained? I'm thinking on that quite a bit while I wait for the call of the repairman.

5-01-07 boughten things...

Gas $31.06 (OMG. That's only 3/4 of a tank.)
$1 - juice box for my kid (the adorable Budget Edemame) at a (shudder) McDonald's so that she had a drink and we could use the bathroom without me feeling guilty. Damn if they haven't jacked all the prices up in there. A bottle of water was $1.35???? jeez.

So far so good. Any advice on avoiding the juice buying in the future? I am going to stock a small cooler in the car with stuff and I always appreciate tips. Goldfish and water are obvious. Anything you love that's shelf stable and not full of disgusting chemicals?

Groceries 4-25-07

In the spirit of starting as we mean to go on, here's what I got at the grocery store just now.

Pasta 4 boxes (2 for 1!)
Jello 3 boxes
Bananas 4
1 dozen eggs
1 head of lettuce
1 box Twinings tea
1 bottle of lemon juice
4 bottles of seltzer (we're trying to go off soda as well...ack!)
2 gallons of milk
2 chickens
1 lb. ground turkey
1 March of Dimes shoe
total $33.40