Money

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!

Money

SNL-dont buy stuff you cant afford from Dean Francis on Vimeo.

Truth

Lately I’ve been feeling a little frustrated with my finances. Normally I run a tight budget ship (I mean, I check Mint.com multiple times a day…), but a series of unexpected healthcare and holiday related expenses have put me behind my savings goals. While I contribute a healthy amount to my retirement accounts, my personal savings has not moved in several months!!! With that in mind I worked extra time this month, had several “No Spend Days” and have sold several hundred dollars worth of goods on eBay, yet still I’m not getting ahead! UGHHH!!!!

Drastic measures must be taken, and I love a good experiment.

So last year I gave up a lot of things in February- I stopped drinking, I was vegan and sugar free. That was… interesting. Kind of terrible, but I survived. In the hopes for a good shakeup (and lots of money saved!) I’ve decided to do a “Spending Diet*” this February. And I’ll be blogging about it. Because admitting to my friends and family that I can’t control my spending for a month sounds deeply humiliating to me.

So, here’s how my “diet” will work. Based on what I saw from my expenses last month, I  drew up a list of things that are okay to spend money on. And then I’ve got $200 dollars of play money to spend on everything else (comedy shows, clothes, yarn, new sneakers). With $200 I’ll have to be careful. I think I’ll probably have to use that money for social obligations, honestly. You can’t just go out for drinks with someone and drink water. It’s just not worth it.

OK to Spend List

  • Rent/Utilities/Household supplies/Laundry
  • Limit $100 for Food/drinks/coffee per week (I know that this is a lot of money for some people, but I love food & cocktails so much that I easily go over every single week. Just being honest. I’m hoping that eating out of my pantry will help alleviate the costs)
  • Limit $40 bucks for entertainment- I already know I’ve committed to a couple of events
  • Anything health related- emergency room bill, vitamins, flu meds, co-pays
  • Transportation costs- I ride my bike to work half the time, but some days it is better just to take BART or Muni. I’m not counting taxis in this list.
  • Birchbox subscription (It’s kind of annoying to cancel and restart a service just to save 10 bucks, you know?)
  • Retirement contributions
  • Valentine’s present (well I guess I don’t want to be a grinch)
  • Any costs related to selling things on eBay/Amazon/etsy
  • Taxes

Oy. I feel pretty nervous about this already, but I’m looking forward to seeing how much I can save! I’ll try to share a status update at least once a week here on the blog. If you end up doing something similar, let me know. I’m curious how it works out for you.

*The term comes from the blog And Then We Saved, which is famous for the author’s admirable 15 month Spending Fast, which allowed her to pay off 24k in debt. Definitely check it out. It’s super inspiring.

Art

I’m currently reading This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, Ann Patchett’s latest essay collection. So fucking good. Here’s a passage that really resonated with me as I was reading at the laundromat today. It’s from a piece about the passing of her dog Rose.

I want to tell you that Rose was an extraordinary dog, bossy and demanding of attention, comforting in her very presence. Famously, she first appeared in the pages of Vogue fifteen years ago. She sat on my shoulder in book jacket photographs. When she was very dirty after a run I would tell her to go get in the bathtub, and she would. She once scampered onto the headrest of Karl’s parked car, made a vertical leap through the open sunroof, and ran across the parking lot, into the grocery store, and up and down every aisle until she found us. She was loyal and brave and as smart as a treeful of owls. By explaining her talents and legions of virtues, though, I would not be making my point, which is that the death of my dog hit me harder than the deaths of many people I have known, and this can’t be explained away by saying how good she was. She was. But what I was feeling was something else entirely.

I came to realize in the months following Rose’s death, months that I referred to myself as being in the ditch, that there was between me and every person I had ever loved some element of separation, and I had never seen it until now. There had been long periods spent apart from the different people I loved, due to nothing more than circumstances. There had been arguments and disappointments, for the most part small and easily reconciled, but over time people break apart, no matter how enormous the love they feel for one another is, and it is through the breaking and the reconciliation, the love and the doubting of love, the judgement and then the coming together again, that we find our own identity and define our relationships.

Life

Miracle on 14th St.

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A couple of weeks ago I was lying in bed reading the internet on my phone, when I saw that  my friend Michelle had a new post up on her blog about goals and cream puffs. It’s a baking blog, so yeah I suppose that makes sense. The post is your usual blog end of the year recap and look forward, and while I knew ahead of time that Michelle had had a big year, for some reason reading about her multitude of accomplishments while staring at beautiful pastries that I could never have greatly discomforted me.

Why is it that my natural reaction to a friend’s success is sudden insecurity? Is it because I didn’t do something big like buy a house? No, I don’t even want a house.  I wasn’t sure, but then it was obvious.

In the back of my mind I was thinking of a certain “goal post” that I’d written earlier in the year. I was scared to look at it, to be honest. Yet when I did I was pleasantly surprised. I hit most of my goals. The ones that fell to the wayside had a heavy emotional investment, and as a result I didn’t get them done. Too fucking painful, surprise surprise.

I spent the last half of December pondering what my goals for the new year should be. Every time someone asked me what my resolutions were, I would make something up. Lose weight, increase my net worth maybe? Try as I might, it just felt like I was forcing it to play the game.

Truthfully, I know what I want. I just want this lost and wandering sadness to go away. I want my life to be busier and simpler, if that is possible. I want to start new creative projects and to make some money on the side. Try things, have them fail, or hopefully succeed. Move around, shake things up. What goal is that? I’m not sure how to articulate it.

A few days before I took off for the holidays I was cleaning out the kitchen pantry. I pulled out a few shelves to better sort through the contents. The hole in the cabinet revealed yet another mess, but there in between the plastic bags and the rat poop was an envelope! I reached in, pulled it out, and yes there was a real letter in the envelope, and it was dated to a former tenant of my apartment, circa 2003!!!

As a journal and letter addict I was in heaven. I don’t know how but I didn’t read it immediately. I waited until I felt ready, and read the letter with a glass of wine.

The letter was from a young woman living in Long Beach, and addressed to her male friend (and perhaps romantic interest) who lived in my apartment, of course. In the letter, which spans the course of several weeks and stops and starts mid-sentence multiple times, the woman talks about waitressing in Long Beach, missing family back home in Topeka, and wishing desperately for some sort of direction in life. You can feel her 20-something year old heart all bloodied up on the page, aching for someone to love and some place to belong. It was very dramatic in that special 20-something way. If this story had happened ten years later, I imagine that it would be posted on ThoughtCatalog.

The letter ended a bit breathless and confused, which meant that I felt breathless and confused as well. Whatever happened to this poor woman? Did she ever go back to school? Did she and he work out? Did she move to San Francisco? I am a person that needs to know the end of the story, even if the story is terrible. I mean, I read the entire 50 Shades of Grey because I HAD to know.

So I googled her. And while I can’t verify that it’s her, there is a person with her name living in the area, working at Google. And someone with her friend/former love interest’s name is now a poet living in Oakland. Hmmmmmmm…

My roommate suggested contacting the old tenant to return the letter (he’s quite active on Twitter), but I don’t know if he would want it. It was stuffed pretty far back there. Perhaps he was hiding it from someone? Also, and this is completely selfish, but I don’t want to break the illusion. I want to believe. I want to believe that that scared and confused and kind of angry woman is now a happy smiling outdoorsy woman who did go back to school, and she now works at Google doing not evil things. She takes the bus down every day and even though the commute is killing her, most other things in her life are pretty great. Every now and then she sees her ex and they have a $4 coffee as they talk about the past and more importantly the future.

So I read the letter, and reread it, and I keep thinking about the woman who wrote it. This is kind of cheesy, but finding her letter hidden in my kitchen feels like my end of the year miracle. For some stupid reason, I have hope that it worked out for her. That hope spills over into my own life. Whatever goals I choose for myself this year don’t ultimately matter. One way or another, things have a way of working themselves out in the end.

Craft, Knitting

Knit: In Progress: Top Down Biggo Sweater

I’m chugging away on the Top Down Cozy Weekend Sweater in KnitPicks Biggo, and it’s been fun.

Progress, glorious progress.

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Check out that 8 inches of hot cowl action. Boring to knit! But necessary.

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And here it is on. I have a bit more done but the needles weren’t long enough to wrap around my shoulders. In truth it probably goes to my armpits at this point.

Thoughts so far on the pattern and the yarn:

The yarn has been pretty fun to work with. It feels good on the hands and the resulting fabric is fluffy (if dense). The only problem I’ve had with Biggo is that it’s the devil to join a new ball via spit splicing. The yarn just doesn’t like it (probably because of the nylon content).

The pattern was 5 bucks on Ravelry, and so far so good. The handholding at the beginning with the increases for the body of the sweater are a little annoying to keep up with, but once I switched to using a highlighter to keep track of where I was on the pattern, things went more smoothly.

I sized up from size 10 needles to 10 and a half, and while I’m getting gauge with the yarn I kind of wish that I’d sized up again to maybe an 11 or so. The fabric is quite dense and heavy, and I don’t know if I like the stiffness. I’d prefer a softer sweater with a more relaxed drape. Oh well. I’m not going back and fixing it now, that’s for sure. Onward!