Wow.
What a change from January. I’ll try to remain level-headed and retain my glee, but I just have to shout it from the rooftops one last time: What a change from January!!
A brief recap of the situation, for anyone who hasn’t been following along: one of my goals at the beginning of the year was to get my financial situation in hand. Specifically to maintain a positive bank balance in January and February. I quickly gave myself some wiggle room, but it wasn’t enough. January was a bit of, ummm, a mess.
My goals for February were simple enough:
- to maintain a positive bank balance
- to tweak some budget categories to more realistically depict my spending
- to earn €100 in ‘extra’ income and
- to avoid eating out for a month.
First: we projected to spend €2712.53 this month, and we spent €2777.11 instead, a positive difference of €64.58. That’s one of the lowest totals for a long time. We earned €3400.28, which means that we earned €687.75 more than we spent. Not that we got to have this money cash in hand, but it did fill up our overdraft very nicely.
How did we achieve this? First of all, we didn’t pay car or home insurance this month, or the water bill, for a total of €219.96. And we didn’t eat out (goal 4) until February 27th, when we celebrated our sudden windfall with a pizza. That saved us about another €100. And we just paid lots of attention, in general. We overspent by €17.17 on gas, €17.04 on groceries (without eating out), €13.14 on fabric, and €41.89 at the Post Office.
Which leads me to goal 2. Even though I’ve tweaked the budget for shipping expenses, I need to pay more attention to my BookMooch requests, or add a bit more to the mail category. I’ve already told the four moochers waiting that their books won’t be shipped until the end of March.
I fell a bit short with goal 3. I earned €53.07 at the consignment store, €12.50 from Ebay, and $32 from Etsy. With the current exchange rate, that’s a total of €86.50.
My goals for March: Coming soon, but we can safely say that they’ll be Onwards and Upwards!
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{ 4 comments }
That is awesome. Doesn’t it give you such a feeling of accomplishment? I just tweaked our budget to more accurately reflect our spending as well. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t think I’d enjoy budgeting as much as I have. It’s quite empowering actually.
Shaun-
I really enjoy budgeting too! It is a feeling of power, and it gives me such a kick when I can get it right.
Congrats!!!
It must make you feel like going on and that is the way you will get out of debt!
This is so, so inspiring! I’m really enjoying reading your story.