Woo hoo! Week 1 is done. That makes me a fourth of the way through my Frugal February experiment.  I thought I’d do a quick check in.

Here’s everything I spent money on this week:

Sat 2/1

• Whole Foods 52.41
• laundry 10.40
• coffee for two and one caramel macaron 5.50
• bridge toll 5

Sun 2/2

• Trader Joe’s 30 ( I didn’t really need more groceries, but I had a car for the day. Normally when I go to TJ’s it’s a 30 minute walk each way.)

Mon 2/3

• train to work (BART) 3.70
• concert cover 6
• one terrible cocktail 9 🙁
• drunken pizza 8 (sigh)
• drunken Red Bull 3 😀

Tues 2/4

• Philz coffee 2.25 (Philz is always worth it)

Wed 2/5

• BART 3.70
• Insanity DVD set 50 (pricey, but I’m counting this towards health)
• cold medicine 6 (achoo)

Thurs 2/6

• BART 3.70
• crab and tomato noodle soup 9.50
• latte 4

Fri 2/7

• BART 3.70
• laundry 7

 

How’d I do?…

Food/Coffee Costs (100 budget/wk)- I categorized the Red Bull and coffees under food costs and came in with 34 cents to spare! DAMN! WOOO! Success! This is big for me because I always always seem to be spending an insane amount of money on food.

Health (No budget on this)- $56 Basically for about a week or so I had been trying to watch Insanity videos via YouTube and sketchy Asian sites and it was a miserable failure with our crappy internet. I found a woman selling her DVDs on Craiglist and thought it was a good deal, considering that the original DVD sets are about 150 bucks. This still feels like a splurge, but I’m giving myself a pass because it’s not breaking my original rules.

Laundry (No budget) – $17 because I did laundry twice this week. Normally I spread out my laundry to about 10-14 days, but whatever.

Transportation (No budget)- $19.80. It rained all week, so I took the train to work. But geez, it adds up, hunh?

Everything else/Splurge money (50/wk) – The coffee/macaron, concert, cocktail, and lunch out at work left me with $20.00 leftover. WOO! Rolling this $ over to next week!

 

 General Thoughts So Far…

I was pretty nervous at the beginning of the week since I’d spent a large chunk of my food and fun budgets on expensive groceries and going out, but things slowed down once the workweek started. Besides the one cocktail I had on Monday, I had no other alcohol this week, which is kind of unusual for me, but a good thing I think.

Whenever I bring my lunch in to work I kind of hit a mental breaking point by Thursday. By Thursday I just don’t give a fuck. I guess you can see that above. I didn’t even really want that latte! I just wanted to get out of the office.

This upcoming week I’m going to try really hard to spend less on groceries so I can go out for dinner or grab a drink or two outside the house. I’m thinking that I’ll do this by planning my meals for the week around what’s in my pantry. I’ll also be purchasing all of my veggies from the cheapie asian market, and then buying the rest of my groceries at the regular grocery store and not Whole Foods.  For my fun money I’m thinking that I might spend the $ on a nice dress for this event I have to go to on Monday. Frivolous, but if I stay in budget, why not?

Onward!