budget

I’ve been doing my best to keep a detailed record of everything I’ve spent over the past three weeks. It would’ve made more sense to do this after a month, surely, but I can’t sleep and organizing things makes me a bit excited. I’ll leave the proper figures til I’ve got more data, as three weeks isn’t an awful lot to go on. But initial thoughts from looking at everything written down:

• Transport costs are something that can be easily reduced. There’s nowt stopping me from walking to where I wanna go during the day – a good portion of my journeys were around half an hour’s walk away. This budget’s mainly for when I move out, which will hopefully be a lot nearer to… everything really. I do walk to uni every day which saves at least a tenner a week, but it’s still something I need to keep an eye on.
• I eat out a hell of a lot. Over the three weeks I consistently ate out four times a week which is quite ridiculous considering I’ve got a well-stocked cupboard and a mountain of tupperware! Lunch at uni is easily solved, it just involves getting up a wee bit earlier to prepare something.
• I should be a bit more stingy with buying rounds of drinks when I go out. I also had a very cheap and enjoyable night out with my straight edge friend – water is free! :)
• Not much I can do about groceries other than hunting for bargains and knowing where to shop. I should definitely try to use up most of the junk in the cupboard/freezer, shall give that a try this week maybe.
• Egh, I had a bit of a splurge on books in the second week of January. Late Christmas present? :/
• I did save money by staying at friend’s houses after spending the evening with them rather than getting the last bus, then simply walking home the next day. I do realize how that may sound to minds which reside in the gutter, but I ain’t shagging any of them, honest guv. Not anymore anyway. :( Ahem...
• I don’t have enough data to properly assess the phone credit thing but from what I’ve got so far I’m definitely better getting a contract.

So aye, those are the conclusions I’ve drawn from what I’ve got at the moment. Ooh, it’s all gone a bit scientific method, hasn’t it? More… data… needed…

I’ve made several attempts to keep track of my spending with a view to drawing up a budget but none have produced very fruitful results – I always miss a couple of days and end up abandoning the venture altogether. So… I’ll hopefully be moving out in July-ish and before then I’d like to have a proper budget drawn up. To do this I’m gonna keep track of my expenditure for at least a couple of months then tart the data up in a pie chart or summat. Four days down…