manage my finances better

I haven’t looked at my budget in several weeks, and frankly I’m a little scared to now. I had a shitty couple of weeks, so I indulged in some retail therapy. And it involved buying about 12 bottles of shampoo and conditioner. Clearly I was not in the right frame of mind to have money in my pocket.

One of my coworkers gave me a great budget template that I’ve been using for about 6 months now. It has been incredibly helpful. I sometimes wonder what I did before I started using it.

I still need to work on spending the money in a more wise way, now that I’ve tackled tracking how I’m spending it in the first place.

Man, things have gotten out of control. I don’t know what the deal is. I need to focus a little more on paying the things that need to be paid (like the car payment, and the electric bill) and stop spending my money on things that I shouldn’t, like going out to eat and crap like that. It’s not like I go out to fancy restaurants all the time (or any real restaurants, for that matter), but eating out for lunch every day definitely adds up.

So here’s the plan: bring my lunch to work, pay the bills on time, and put the rest in the bank, so the next time the car breaks down or I have to buy $300 worth of books for school, I don’t screw myself.

The really frustrating thing is, I don’t even have anything to show for the money I blow. This is getting ridiculous.