Tuesday, February 06, 2007

January Spending

I've been feeling like a crazed consumer lately, but how did I do against my spending budgets last month? Not too bad, I think, as a lot of my spending was on one-time items, and my routine monthly spending was pretty much in line:

Clothing: $437-- over my $150 monthly budget but I'll have other months where I'm under budget. And part of this was a $75 pair of shoes from Zappo's that has already been returned.
Dining: $495-- yes! I recently revised my dining budget from $650 down to $600 and I still beat it this month due to lots of cooking at home.
Education: $99 (tuition and a book)
Entertainment: $11 (movie rentals)
Gifts: $30
Home Repair: $163-- nothing's broken yet, so it's not technically repair. This is all painting supplies and miscellaneous hardware store purchases. (I don't have a monthly budget number assigned to this category. I'm trying to track these expenses, and some of my Household expenses against a total budget of $5000 that I came up with for buying furniture and other miscellaneous items. I actually might recategorize some things in Quicken so I can separate these start-up expenses from other everyday things like laundry or buying paper towels. I'll have to look at these expenses more in a future post.)
Household: $410-- definitely did some damage here, and it doesn't even include the $80 that I spent on sheets, since I decided not to enter that until the final bill arrives from Bloomingdales (they do this weird thing where your 15% discount for opening a charge card only shows up once you get your statement). About $22 of this is laundry and drycleaning, but the rest is outdoor furniture for my balcony and some pillows. (Budget was $50)
Subscriptions: $156-- this includes the newspaper, a couple of magazines that I had to renew, and AOL. (budget was $77)
Travel: $119 (budget was $333 but this is another one where it fluctuates a lot from one month to another)
Gas & Electric: $67 (budget was $100)
Telephone: $88 (budget was $100)

3 comments:

Bitty said...

Madame, you still have AOL? :0

You alone are keeping that company afloat.

Anonymous said...

word..AOL has been in my trash for couple years...i've switched and only have AIM...hahaha

Madame X said...

I just can't bring myself to give up my email address! But I finally ordered high-speed internet again and switched to the plan where AOL is free.