I have a bit more encouragement and support this year in the form of Facebook budget "support" groups and an added very supportive person in my life.
Another reason why I don't think 2013 took off the way I had intended was because my ex was in the process of getting ready to move in with me... If you knew his spend-y and manipulative ways, you'd get why trying to stay on track was a difficult feat.
I'm on a far better and more structured path this time around, and I would like to share some of the things I'm doing to remain on track.
I've been tracking my budget using the EveryDollar online application. One of the downsides with most budget trackers that are highly rated, is that their automated bank account download features are only available to those in the US. I'm in Canada, so everything is manual entry for me, but it's been an AMAZING tool for me to see exactly where my spending needs a smack across the face.
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| A snapshot of what my EveryDollar percentage looks like for December 2015, sans actual figures. |
The other thing I've started doing, is keeping track of item sale prices based on the food and other products that I buy on a regular basis. As someone who works as an analyst, I decided to use some of my daily work tools to build somewhat of a database to store this kind of info, using Excel.
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| Base Data Set with product name, brand and cost per unit |
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| Pivot Table derived from the data set above |
All I've done is created a pivot table that takes the AVG price per unit per product per store and allows me to compare costs across all stores at which I most frequently shop OR from which I most frequently price match. Price matching is one of my favourite things to do since I can accumulate more points and spend less money doing so at the most convenient-to-me and grocery store in my neighbourhood.
And finally, the last tool I'm using is a debt snowball tracker a la Dave Ramsey. I use a custom sort on which items to pay off first based on a number of factors, but that is the tool that is driving the rest of what I'm doing, since I'm able to more accurately predict a pay off date based on my debt vs my payments towards the debt.
I still plan to keep track of my spending via this blog, to keep me accountable to what I'm doing. I do have a pair of cowboy boots to finish paying for this coming weekend. That's going to set me back almost $150, but it's not an item I plan to wear out anytime soon, so I'm not too concerned about the dollar spending (Quality vs quantity).
Debt repayment is a whopping $800... Let's just say that I'm somewhat disappointed with that, since I was able to pay off more than $1200 in December, Of course, my income was much more in December as well since I picked up a few side hustles in Oct & Nov, so I know that helped, but I still hope to do more to pay things off faster.
My fun money for January is $300, so I'll really be looking at about $40 a week, which is still quite a bit in all honesty... At 5 working days a week, that's $8 a working day or approximately $5.50 a calendar day. Every calendar day I don't spend any fun money, I really should just move it right over to my savings account... Maybe. We'll see what happens. :)
- Negative K