Week 10 Budget Assessment
By Matt - Wednesday, August 6th, 2008
From week to week I try to figure out what will be happening and to budget appropriately keeping my spending in check. But as pretty much everyone knows this doesn’t always work out, stuff happens and we end up spending more money. Now this doesn’t necessarily mean anything bad and this is what happened for me this past week. There was a chance that we would go up to our friend’s cottage and we did. The thing is that I wasn’t planning for this because when I did my budget up the possibility of this seemed low. Here are this week’s numbers:
| Weekly Budget July 28-Aug 3 |
||
| Budget | Actual | |
| Alcohol | $20.00 | $46.35 |
| Food-Lunch | $0.00 | $15.17 |
| Food | $80.00 | $120.60 |
| Gas | $40.00 | $143.61 |
| Entertainment | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| Smokes | $30.00 | $27.80 |
| Misc | $50.00 | $61.09 |
| Transportation | $25.000 | $0.00 |
| Total | $245.00 | $422.62 |
The impact this weekend had on my budget was pretty significant since I spent about $100 on gas to get up there and back. Overall without the additional spending that occurred for this weekend I would have likely been under budget (I’m estimating about $230). Although this weekend was incredibly expensive from a budget perspective it was very necessary for me. This is the first weekend that we’ve had completely off and it will probably end up being my only vacation this summer.
Although this isn’t a great week budget wise I was fairly happy that if I were to exclude the cost of the weekend I would have been under budget. Even if I had ended up spending a bit more I’m glad that overall I’ve been able to tighten my belt financially. I am starting to feel that my day to day spending has gotten under control and I’ll be able to tighten my belt a bit more to ensure that I’m living below my means rather than above them.
This entry is filed under Budgeting and Planning.
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