Save $3000

I just hit $2500. Considering that 6 weeks ago, I had just hit $1500, that’s really kind of something. I saved $1000 in six weeks!

Anyway, Three more weeks till my goal date, the 12th, so if I keep going at about the same rate, the last $500 will be a piece of cake. YAY!

I’m at $2,125.00 right now, which isn’t bad, but it turns out I’m only going to be able to put in about $270 in this month, which puts me about $610 short of my goal.

It was already clear to me a few months ago that I’d be a few hundred short of the goal by the goal date, that being September 1st. But I had also thought that in August, I’d be able to put aside four or five hundred dollars towards it, and then I got hired to play in a wedding band for which I got paid $300 this past weekend. It would have put me really, really close, but it’s just not going to happen.

Oh well. The goal was really to have $3000 or more by my move date, which is another two weeks after the first, so it’s no big deal, since I’ll still be working both jobs to the end of the second week of September, and I’ll probably work the last two days before I pick up my truck at my night job.

I have another paid music gig this week that might make me a hundred or so, and possibly another wedding on the 9th of September, which would be another $300.

Add in my return on my apartment’s security deposit, which will hopefully be a full $595, and I should be well beyond my goal.

I’m officially changing my goal date to September 12th, and I’m also allowing it to include money that I have earned, but have not yet recieved payment for by that day. It should all roughly total up to around $3500, but it’s still too early to say. We’ll see.

Anyway, right now, I’m at 71% with seven weeks left to go. Not too bad.

$1500, you are my bitch.

Man, I’m $84.19 away from my halfway point. I’m actually ahead of “schedule” by quite a lot, so I’m stoked, but it would be SOOOO nice to be at $1500 right now, just for the peace of mind.

I’ve been working at my night job a lot more than I had been figuring on for my budget, so whereas it’s driving me crazy, and I need to start cutting back down to 2 or 3 days a week instead of the 5 I’m doing this week (this is in addition to a full-time day job, and playing in several bands as well) so I can do things like laundry, dishes, and I dunno…sleep? Ever heard of it?

But yeah, it’s good to be ahead of the game.

I also very likely will be playing with some friends at a wedding late next month, and it might earn me a solid $300. That would be nice.

I’m at 38% right now, and by the end of the month, should be almost at halfway. Starting to get excited! I can do it! I can do it!

I just dumped $270 into my savings account, which puts me at $863, about 29%. Two more paychecks from the day job and one more from the night job before the months is over. Out of that, the remaining $137 to get me to $1000, one-third of the way towards the goal, is a piece of cake.

That leaves me about three months (though September 1st isn’t the exact deadline for my goal, just “September”) to make the remaining $2000.

I will have accumulated the first $1000 in about two and a half months. I also worked myself to death, but I was also in school. I might be able to work a few more hours at the night job with a little more ease, since I won’t have homework and deadlines to worry about, though I am still considering taking a summer school class.

However, $2000 in three months, considering how much I make, could still be tricky.

I’m allowing myself a slightly higher disposable spending budget until June than I usually allow (by about $20-$30 a week), but I just have to relax a little. Between about September through April of last year, other than the week of my birthday and thanksgiving, things were pretty grueling and always really tight. I need to stretch my legs a little.

Since my savings goal is in tandem with my moving to Seattle goal, the exact mark of $3000 may not be necessary. More than that would be ideal, but I may be able to successfully move without too much trouble with a few hundred shy of three grand.

Unless it gets too late into september, though, I think I’ll stick it out until I have at least $3000 sitting in the savings account.

Another great thing is that with my bank, they stop charging me monthly fees of $3.00 for keeping my savings account after I have exceeded a balance of $600. The amount of interest I accrue will also likely increase as well.

It’s funny how they charge you more money the less money you have, isn’t it.

However, a very good friend of mine, who I’m in a band with, has another band who I occasionally sit in with on banjo when their fiddle player can’t make it (I never thought I’d be in a country band, much less enjoy it so freaking much). They’re touring northern continental europe in September, and he’s BEGGING me to go with them.

It would be such an awesome experience, but it not be plausible. I can’t afford to pay for myself without totally forfeiting my goal here. Even if I don’t move to Seattle, I need to have that money for something really important. I do love music, I love playing, going to Europe would be so exciting and so experience-building. However, I’m not even an official member of this band, I decided a while ago that music will not be my official career (short of being one of those indie-hobbyists who stumbles onto critical and financial success without selling his soul…too much). It sort of throws an odd wrench into everything.

There is a possible happy medium, though. If they need me bad enough, and provided I am very near my $3000 goal, they could subsidise my travel expenses, it’d be right around the time that I’d be planning on moving anyway, and I could just do my last day at the local jobs, go to Holland and Belgium to play some old timey country for a week or two, fly back home, say goodbye to everybody, and then pack up the truck and head for Seattle.

We’ll have to see.

Anyway, still not close enough to the goal to get complacent yet, but I’m pretty stoked at having come this far without once having to dip into the pot, and with relative “ease”. I mean, I’ve been working a lot and pretty hard, but there have been no major meltdowns or singularly huge obstacles. It’s been pretty steady.

I’m one-fifth there. I’m on a good track to be one-third there by the end of the month!

Just hit 10% of the goal this past weekend.

My goal is to have it all by September 1st. I don’t think that it’s actually possible, but the harder I try, the closer I will get to the actual goal. If I don’t set a specific goal like that, then it becomes too easy to just throw in a few dollars here and there telling myself I’ll make it up later, or even siphen out a few bucks for something.

Anyway, I’ve got $210.33 in savings right now. That’s only around 7%. The remaining 93% has to come in four and a half months.

That $210.33 came pretty fast, though, and after recovering from being unexpectedly let go from a job, so I’m doing pretty well.

My more current goal, which is to have $235 in savings by the end of this month is already very close to being surpassed, and since I’ve ended up taking more shifts at my night job than anticipated, I might even double my target for this month.

It’ll be something to get up to just $300, even. Ten percent. Twenty percent, $600, will be even better, because at that point, my bank will stop charging me $3.00 per month for having a savings account.

I’m 30. I’ve lived paycheck to paycheck since I was just out of highschool. I’ve mostly worked clerical and administrative jobs, and you know what? I am better than that.

I have had a really bad year, and I can’t say it isn’t in some part my own fault for being a coward, for being lazy. But I’m a people person; I need to have good people around me, and I sort of grew up in an environment (a very socially manipulative religious organization) that kind of forced me to break away from it and blaze my own trail in young adulthood.

Furthermore, I’ve always thought that your personal interests (not to be confused with just being selfish) and your close friends and family should come first, not your career.

I’m an artist and a musician, and that’s mostly where I focused myself. But in looking back, sure a lot of it was just that it takes a lot of people a long time to figure out what to do with their lives, but I was just lazy and scared. Mostly scared of not having enough time to be around the people I liked, so making a mediocre income doing dumb jerk jobs seemed okay to me.

But now I’m working two jobs in order to get by and save some money. I’ve had savings before, but it would always get up to a few hundred, and then dwindle.

I’ve had the good fortune lately of having something like an epiphany to let me know that, since I like to keep my most cherished interests to myself (like writing and playing music), that I had to still put my real self out on the chopping block, so to speak, and use it as part of my career. I’ve gotten back in school and I’m studying graphic design. I mostly want to be an illustrator.

I’ve learned a lot more about what it really means to work. I guess it’s a work ethic. God I sound so square, but now I just kinda get it more. If you even bother having a job at all, why not do the best at it that you can?

Anyway, my two jobs are both of the just “get by” kind. It’s not like I want to be rich or anything, but I want to be good at something and feel confident. I’d say that I don’t even care if I make more money, but well…heh, I am pretty broke. I got rid of my car, and I live in a cramped little one-bedroom house.

As far as my schooling goes studying design and so forth, I’m kind of just barely starting out taking two night classes learning the basics on Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.

I tried working an illustration job, but it turned out really to be almost more like construction and manual labor for a company that made big props for fancy parties. I did do some painting (which I’m not so great at anyway) and I even designed a model for a prop for a christmas party, but it didn’t work out, it was a really strange job, and I was just too new to the business. This was before I had started school, too. I didn’t know how to work illustrator hardly at all, and I think if I had, it might have saved me.

I came home pretty exhausted most of the time, and usually covered with paint.

But I keep on trying. I’ve been through seven jobs in the past year. It’s been that bad. I voluntarily left one, but I was let go from three of them, and I’m currently working two.

Why three thousand dollars?

A few hundred is too easy to “accidentally” spend all of, thinking that you’re going to put it back really soon. Three thousand is a lot. I hardly have any saved right now. Less than $100, even. But I’m determined.

I might move to a different state, I’m considering Seattle. If I do that, I’m going to have to find a place to live and be able to support myself, possibly before I even have a new job yet.

I want to go back to school on a more full-time basis, as well. $3000 may not be a whole lot in that respect, but it sure is better than nothing.

Basically, I have a lot of work to do. I just can’t live like this any more. Having a decent amount of money saved; money in case I’m unexpectedly unemployed again, money to quit a job and find a better one, money to help me through school while I work part time, money to move to a new city, or money to just sit on and collect interest with.

I need to do it. My goal is to have it by september, which is going to really be some feat, as I don’t make a lot of money. But it needs to be done.