Well April is a lost month

I've given it up for dead already. Between the dental work, and some good value shopping this weekend, it's a dead month. All necessities and setbacks are normal, but oy.

Feb 2009 Spending

A good and bad month... 

Fast food is high because it's how I filed most Hawaii meals when I got sandwich, etc. to go. Student loan is truly $500, just last payment didn't hit yet. Restaurants higher than the were shaping to be -- a night out Saturday. Need to learn to account for credit card payments that aren't double -- i.e. accounts I'm paying down. Not sure how to do that, but I'll figure it out.

An overview of spending...

So I found out that I could look at my trends going back to May 2008 in Mint and decided to play around a bit. I ended up pulling out May and only looking at the past three months because May was ridiculously out of sync with reality due to Beth's shower, graduation, etc. So I stuck with starting my post-grad life, aka June 2007.

June, rent and part of the security deposit paid in advance. $1,631 on healthcare was yet more dental work. That's with a discount with my student insurance. The work needed to be done, end of story. The $425 auto isn't truly auto, it's partially train passes which Mint doesn't appear to have a way to classify. By far, the bulk of my expenses. Not a terrible month but not great.
Balance of the security deposit plus some purchases for the new place, more train travel (last before having it completely covered by work. "Kids and Education" is my student loan payment and "Pets" is because Mint has pet grooming but not laundry. Odd odd.  Too much money on eating out, no excuse. Also in there is the cost of moving into the city.

August: couple student loans came out of in-school deferment, waiting on consolidation. Rent and utilities, a payment on my mattress, more dental work. Really, I can't complain about the bulk of my expenditures. It's life. 

So there's the big picture for three months. Not wonderful, but not terrible. I know I need to get the food costs down, figure out where the "No Category" is going. But overall, no surprises, which is a good thing.

Six weeks in...

While I had been commuting from the northern suburbs for some time, I officially moved in on July 12th. The biggest realizations so far:

• grocery prices really do vary from store to store. It's worth it on the weekends to walk/bus to the different stores to get the better price. I get all circulars by e-mail but it's going to take some more time to learn the regular prices of things to know where to go for a given item. There's also the law of "just how far will I carry that" for things like a case of water.
• I still spend far too much on eating out, whether that's lunch at work when I didn't bring lunch, dinner because I don't feel like cooking, Subway because of the Scrabble promotion, Tasti D-Lite for dessert, or what not, it's too much. This is likely to be the easiest place to save noticeable money.
• Electricity in summer is evil!

On a not directly related but still wallet-impacting note, student loan consolidation is taking forever and once that's done, my monthly payments will go down. I'm going to try and screen grab Mint to get my August expenditures.