Related to my March update: because I’m the kind of organized nerd who plans my 101 Things projects for the upcoming month, I’ve decided that one of my April tasks will be #19, spend only cash for a month and see if my budget changes. I kept putting this off because I was waiting for a ‘normal month’ to happen, i.e. one in which we weren’t traveling or doing anything different than usual. Then I realized that was kind of silly, and that a normal month often does include some kind of travel. So I’m going with it.
Though we’re going to LA at the end of April, we’re also spending an entire weekend doing trivia and mostly trapped in the house. I figure that spending should sort of balance out, right? Anyway, I’m setting up some ground rules for this.
- It only applies to my discretionary spending, because our rent, bills, savings, and investments are set, and I keep all that money in a separate account. I have $500 per bi-monthly paycheck that goes into my Schwab checking account, so that’ll be the source of my cash. This isn’t entirely play money, though, because I use it for things like groceries, too.
- I’m not going to try to track where the cash goes, because that’s part of the challenge. I keep track of my finances in Mint.com every day, so this will be a good experiment to see how well I handle something that’s fairly uncontrolled, and whether I become more or less likely to spend.
- I’m going to use my debit card to take money out $100 at a time, instead of all of it at once. That’s because I want to be able to buy things online if necessary, and in that case I’ll transfer the money out of the account so it’s not available. Same as spending cash.
- If I run out of cash, I’m not going to go panhandle by a freeway exit. I’ll think about it, though.
In non-obsessive-list-making-related news, here are some other things that have been going on! I had to actually sit and think about it, because work is so busy it makes my brain cloudy.
– Our save-the-dates are in the mail today!! There was a lot of other work we had to do to get to this point, and I will tell you about that next week after people receive them.
– My San Diego photos are published. We had such a great time there, and I got to have lunch with April!
– I’m nerdblogging about .NET. More on that when it’s all official, but it could be a pretty exciting opportunity.
– There’s been some production issues with the company who makes replacement rollers for my press, so I’m still waiting on that. It’s pretty much the last thing I need to be able to test it, and I’m very impatient! I’m going to investigate the possibility of getting composite instead of rubber rollers, perhaps.
– Opening day(s) plus the NCAA tournament this weekend?? One of the best sports times of the year!
Hooray for nerd blogging!
It’s incredibly useless to try to track cash spending in Mint. Boring Guy and I use cash for our “allowance” (food, gas, and discretionary spending). I just have it set up as two allowance funds, because keeping track of all that minutiae would drive me nuts. Good luck! I find we spend much less when restricted to cash on hand.
yeah, i’m basically just withdrawing it as ‘cash and atm’ and not really going further than that. plus mint’s upgrade broke my credit union connection, and that’s pretty critical to my tracking.