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Today I felt as flat & gray as the weather. I wanted to attempt something productive, preferably something previously put off, so I peeled myself from the couch with a spatula and gathered together the budget box, jar, and notepad (we still don’t have an ideal system down) for June & July, set up the laptop and started sorting & entering. This ate hours.

It’s shocking how long it takes to log in two months worth of household expenses. For the record, it would be great if we could have a month without the “mystery whammy”. Then we could invest the whammy net. It feels good to have this done though – it’s been nagging at me.

Whew! I’m sure it’ll be much easier from here on in, but I spent hours setting up an excel spreadsheet and entering all the bills, receipts, and the budget notebook scribbles for last month. It was a particularly pricey month, due to some new computer equipment and going out more often than usual (our anniversary, a concert, the drive-in), so we came out about even (although the laptop was paid for out of my learn-save fund, not M’s salary, so I’m not sure that counts).

On the decidedly UP side, my tax refund came through and smoothed everything over with some to spare. I guess that WITB wasn’t a pipe dream, since it made up the majority of the cheque. Lovely.

Markus and I sat down and briefly went over the budget after he got home and there are obvious ways we can trim some consumption fat here & there. I think this will prove to be extremely helpful, although doing it in one big chunk was a bit overwhelming. It feels really good to have started paying closer attention.

I also spoke with an acquaintance who’s quite knowledgeable about investing and she suggested I move my flexible GIC to something non-taxable, like mutual funds. I’ll think about that another day though, I’ve had more than enough of money matters today.

We’re going to start keeping a budget this month. I’ve been half heartedly keeping receipts for a while, but we’re both going to make a real effort to keep track of our spending this month, then the plan is to sit down and take a careful look at things, make some future goals in this vein, concoct plans to coddle a nest egg.

Other things I may delve into here: banking, saving, investing, credit ratings, etc. Making friends with financial matters.