Ever since I started freelancing full-time, I’ve been tracking all my expenses. I like to make sure the money going out isn’t greater than the money going in, because that would be a very bad business plan indeed. (Unless you’re the federal government.) This is how I know that my food/grocery expenses have gone up since I moved from Indianapolis to Chapel Hill, though I don’t exactly know why. The first month I was here, I expected it to go up because I had to buy basic staples that I hadn’t bothered to move across the country, and I had to eat out on the road. But August’s bill was about $40-$70 higher than it averaged in Indy.

I’m not sure if the prices at Harris-Teeter are higher than they were at Kroger. I don’t know if I mooched more food off of my old roommate than I realized. I’m spending more time at coffee shops to get out of my apartment, which has bumped the sum a bit. In college I would always run out of money on my meal card before anybody else, so maybe I just eat more than other people. I dunno.

I don’t like this problem, but I don’t like the solution either, which is to analyze prices, sales, and coupons and plan how to buy things at the cheapest rate. Near Lord, that sounds like so much work. I just want to go to the grocery and get what I need. Waiting for bread to go on sale annoys me. It should be on sale all the time!! I also realize this is an incredibly spoiled attitude. I should be grateful food is abundant and easy to acquire at whatever cost, especially when people starve to death every day on this planet and in popular young adult novels.

I know there are web sites that help you figure out when is the best time to buy things, but again, this sounds like work even if it’s less work than without the lists. You have to strategize and figure out what to stock up on things and make meal plans that match what’s on sale. I guess I’ll just have to get over it and start putting more work into my grocery shopping, but BLEH, I’m still annoyed. I have to work at so many other things in my life—my weight, exercise, blogging, emails, web designing, doctors appointments—I wish I could just go buy food without a huge amount of pre-planning.

On the bright side, at least the cartoon dragon at Harris-Teeter is always here to give me free cookies. (I told you animated creatures were going to start following me to the grocery store!)

(I know it says they’re just for kids. I am a kid at heart. And I would run over anyone who tries to stop me with my grocery cart, which you have to admit is very childish.)

12:30pm – Dial Baby Bro’s cell phone from my Saturn as I trail behind him on the way home, totally disregarding Oprah’s No Phone Zone campaign.

“Hey, did they put a dolly on the truck?”

“…”

12:40pm – Say hi to clerks who hate their jobs and grab last dolly, tossing it in the trunk with my back seats folded down.

1:00pm-4:00pm – Baby Bro and I load the truck with approximately 70 boxes, two bookshelves, a night stand, a kitchen cart, and a TV stand. Process goes so amazingly smoothly that I fully expect the truck to explode tomorrow morning.

Wednesday, June 30, 2010
3:00am – Wake up in middle of the night, certain thieves have broken the padlock on the truck and are stealing my She-Ra action figures. Realize She-Ra is fully capable of protecting herself with her magic sword and talking horse. Go back to sleep.

6:30am – Wake up to sun, dreading 13-hour trip ahead of me, yet also wanting to get this show on the road.

7:30am – Crawl out of bed. Make coffee. Eat oatmeal. Pack electronic items and remaining miscellaneous materials into car. Baby Bro hands me Tekken 3 PlayStation Game that he borrowed many years ago. Grateful for the return, but where the hell am I supposed to put this?

8:50am – Say good-bye to Mom who is bawling her eyes out and doing the ugly cry. Give one last hug, tell her I love her, and tell her she can visit anytime.

9:00am – Baby Bro leads in the Budget truck and I follow in the Saturn. Carolinas, here we come!

9:10am – Expected my feline company to be crying like I’d revealed cat chow was made from baby kittens. Instead, it is frighteningly quiet and I can see Java Bean in the front seat cowering in the back of his carrier.

11:00am – Nearly careen into bright yellow semi-truck and a mini-van as Baby Bro and I merge into the far right lane on the I-65 bridge to Louisville. Didn’t check to see if they did, but wouldn’t blame anyone for flipping us the bird.

12:00pm – Stop for gas in Lexington. Baby Bro shields the price on the pump from me. “How much do you think it is?” he asks.

“I dunno, $40?”

Baby Bro cringes, removes hand. Price is $50 and still climbing! Does not bode well for my chances on The Price is Right.

12:10pm – Park truck in Meijer parking lot and drive with Bro in Saturn for lunch at the busiest Chic-fil-A in America. There are two packed drive-thrus and a line literally out the door. Fast food only considered fast to geriatric snails.

12:20pm – Convinced thieves are breaking into the truck and stealing my Cowboy Bebop DVD collection.

12:30pm – Return to parking lot and glad to see padlock in place. Get back on the road after eating lunch. Merge onto highway without pissing off any truckers this time.

3:30pm – Stop for stretch break in Knoxville, Tennessee. Feline company is uninterested in getting out for food or pee break.

4:00pm – Back on the road. Baby Bro is getting sick of same three songs playing on pop radio over and over again. Glad I have MP3 player filled with music, podcasts, and audio books, but feel a bit guilty for it. The random-play-all function would work better if it didn’t keep pulling audio book chapters into the mix. “Chapter Four” is really hard to dance too.

5:00pm – Wow, the mountains are BEAUTIFUL!

5:20pm – HOLY SHIT, the mountains are SCARY! SLOW DOWN! SLOW DOWN! For the love of GOD, SLOW DOWN!!!

7:00pm – Bladder is about to burst. Tell Oprah to go BLEEP herself and call Baby Bro on cell phone, asking for pee break. Stop at Morganton exit in North Carolina. Let the feline company out. Java Bean hides under pedals, still too terrified to pee. Officer Krupke is particularly cuddly today.

7:30pm – Back in the vehicles for one final push to Big Bro’s house in Durham!

8:30pm – Sun is setting. Turn air conditioner down and take sunglasses off. Headache has been playing fairly nice today, but is starting to kick the inside of my skull. Pop a pill from my purse. Realize it has been MUCH easier following someone on this drive. No need to monitor speed, decide to pass people, or watch exits carefully. Has most likely saved my headache from squeezing my brain particularly hard and causing me to careen off a scenic cliff.

9:30pm – See exit sign for Chapel Hill! If I’d signed my lease already, I’d be almost home now!

10:00pm – Arrive at Big Bro’s house in Durham. Stagger out of car, carrying feline company with me into guestroom.

11:00pm – Crash in guestroom where feline company is presumably hiding under the bed, grateful the truck did not explode and that I am still in possession of She-Ra action figures.

To be continued…

The nice thing about Not Quite Plush, But Reasonably Padded Corporate Job was that I did not have to watch my money that closely. I paid all my bills and at the end of the month I actually had money left over! To put in savings! Amazing! Suddenly a lot of stress and anxiety faded out of my life, and I realized the nice part about having money is that you don’t have to worry about not having money. Eventually I decided to leave Not Quite Plush, But Reasonably Padded Corporate Job, so now I’m back to watching my income and expenses very, very, closely.

Last month, I recorded every single purchase and every pay check in one budget program and took a good look at where the money is going. My realizations:

• Wow! Cats are really freakin’ expensive, especially when they both have fleas and are due for their annual exams during the same month.
• Most of my excessive spending is on food. Shocking, I know, that the former morbidly obese woman who likes to cope with her chronic headache with sugar would be racking up the grocery bill. It appears to stem from two issues:
  • In my effort to be social and stay in contact with friends and work buddies, I go out to lunch about once a week, spending more than I would eating at home. I’ll also buy a coffee if I’m using free wi-fi and Barnes & Noble or Panera. This starts to add up.
  • If I’m not feeling well (which is quite often), or I’m tired from working all day, I rationalize getting a Subway sandwich or the pricey sushi at Kroger. I really like rewarding myself with food, but that’s not great for the budget or my weight.
• I thought my gas expenses would be cheaper now that I’m not commuting to the office every day. However, I’ve been going to visit friends in Louisville, running a race in Lexington, and other such traveling, so my gas expenses are about the same as they’ve always been.
• On the positive side, I under-spend in the clothing and leisure categories. I’ll probably have to buy new clothes in winter, but I’ve made do with what I have for summer and fall. As for leisure, I’ve been using the Internet, the library, and Netflix streaming for most of my entertainment, keeping costs low.
• Other good news is that the total electric bill for the shared 3-bedroom apartment is lower than the average total for my old 1-bedroom apartment. I know! I don’t know what’s going on either, except that the new place doesn’t have as many walls exposed to the exterior, plus we’re well shaded. So my electric bill is now less than half what it used to be after I split it with my roommate.
• And of course, I’m saving $300 a month on rent compared to my old place. I’m making up for it by paying bank cash for my health insurance each month though. Oh well! *cough* It sucks to be a sicko.

So, I’m going to try to stop spending so much money on food. However, I think it would be really rude to use free wi-fi without buying a coffee, so I’m not going to stop that. However, I can try to get my friends to eat at cheaper restaurants. Otherwise, I think I live pretty thriftily.

As much as people’s lives are changing, mine hasn’t changed that much. Sure, my job is as secure as a lockbox sealed with chewing gum, and I moved to a cheaper apartment to cut my living costs, but otherwise I’m living the same life I’ve always led. Financially speaking this means I save money, sock cash in my retirement accounts, and spend less than I earn. Evidently I was a radical ahead of my time for doing all these things.

I feel genuinely sorry for the suffering this recession has caused, for people who are stuck in houses that have lost value, for people who can’t make ends meet, and for the retirement plans that have been torpedoed because the stock market went KAPOW!! I know that many people have done all the right things, handled their money wisely, and have still been screwed over by life circumstances. That said, I’m happy that the recession is making some people handle their money in ways they should have been handling it all along. People are saving more, spending less, and watching their budgets like never before. It sometimes takes a disaster to make you do what you should have been doing, and I only say this is because in my early 20′s I learned the hard way how to manage my money too, which means I went SPLAT! into debt.

By the time I graduated college, I had about $5000 in credit card debt. I’d used all my student loans, but I could still use my plastic! I carried a balance for 3 months before I started playing a game where I would sign up for a new credit card that gave me 0% interest for 9 months. Nine months later, I’d sign up for another one and move the money again. I would not recommend this as a good way to handle money, since I have no idea what it did to my FICO score, but it did save me lots of money in interest. I was also fortunate that I’d never missed a payment, so I was approved for these cards.

Have you ever played the board game LIFE? Wasn’t that game a lot more fun before it resembled your actual life? Over the next year I was hit with “Pay $7000 for gallbladder surgery!” and then “You owe $1200 in dentist bills” and then “You transmission breaks! Pay $2000 for a rebuild.” I kept chipping away at my debt, but something always came along to bump it up again.

After two or three years of steady payments, I finally paid the credit cards off, leaving my only debt in student loans and a car loan. The number on those credit card statements had felt like the number of pounds weighing on my back. It was burdensome to be beholden to the credit card companies and to not have enough in savings to cover unexpected emergencies. That’s why I bought some books on personal finance and educated myself about IRAs, compound interest, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, money market accounts, and figured out which places I should put my money first and in what amounts. It was a lot of information, and could be very confusing, but I never, ever, ever wanted to be in debt like that again. So I took the time to learn it myself.

When I bought my car I carefully made a budget and determined how much money I could afford to pay each month on the loan and purchased a vehicle within that price range. When I moved to an apartment, I determined how much I could afford, or what other expenses I would have to cut if I decided to move to a more expensive location. It wasn’t fun, but it was necessary, so I did it.

These days, I use a simple budget program (called SimpleD Budget in case you were going to ask) to enter my receipts into every day. (Or sometimes every 3-4 days if I’m feeling lazy.) I can then look at the numbers and the graphs and get a sense of what I’m spending and if I need to pull back in one area until the end of the month. I’ve tried using more complicated programs like Quicken or Microsoft Money, but they have so many features that I feel overwhelmed. I just want to track my variable spending, not every single asset I have.

There are also free online programs that will help you budget and analyze your spending, like Mint.com or Quicken Online. I have heard great thing about these sites, but I am too paranoid to give a web site all my financial passwords. I’ve worked as a web developer at several companies, and I know how insecure some online products actually are, so no thanks.

If you are looking for more information on personal finances, Suze Orman’s books and shows are extremely helpful and are targeted at newbies and women. I read a book called Girls Just Want to Have Funds simply because I loved the title, which taught me a lot of basics. Sites like The Motley Fool have loads of information, and a good blog on how to manage money is Get Rich Slowly.

Even though the recession sucks, I hope it helps people learn how to manage their money better, just as my young and stupid years taught me to open a Roth IRA and start taking advantage of compound interest. Hopefully we’ll all keep our good “cents” even when this recession is over.