Anybody here actually budget their money?
I was hearing you could write down how much money you'll assign for certain expenses and/or savings. Then you would have only that much to spend. Maybe have a little cushion for unexpected expenses. I'm not doing anything like that now but am keeping more of a mental tab in my head of where my money is going. I'm planning on not getting as many lap dances as recently (unless some really hot girl tempts me). I used to just go by I'll save money when there aren't any good looking dancers in the club offering decent lap dance prices. I think I would be waiting a long time for that to happen. Well, I'll see how long I keep this up. I just want to max out the amount in my Roth IRA. I wonder how many people think about budgeting just to max out a Roth IRA? Probably not too many.
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As far as clubbing, I pretty much go with what casualguy does.
But to answer your question, I never had a budget before, nor do I now, if and when I get to a club. This, of course, is do to the large reduction in visits.
This is a preposterously irresponsible system. I don't actually use it, but it's an interesting theory about how I might work, if I were actually making fat wads of $20s from my employment. :)
Now I budget about everything. I budget the lease miles on my van and I budget my time (I have a calendar now). I'm still working on my 2008 household budget based on 2007.
And I've come to budgeting my SC bankroll. I stop by the ATM and get what I want for the night and that's it. I have to or I will spend like crazy. I actually came home with well over $20 left over from my last SC bankroll.
Damn the budget....full speed ahead!
I'm going to cut back on the number of drinks and probably the number of lap dances this weekend. Last weekend I got a record number from just one dancer. My budget plans will be in trouble if a bunch of old favorites show up. Sounds like I have a dancer budget. I save money if they don't show up. Well, I do limit how much I take and I only spend cash. I only spotted two favorites at one club even though I spotted 2 nice looking dancers from my previous club in that one. I hope they don't switch on me. I bet they would all want to pin me down.
I guess if it wasn't for strip clubs, I would be debating what to do with all my savings. Fully invest up to 16 percent of income in a 401K at work, plus a Roth IRA (I don't know what the limit is if it's a dollar figure for both combined) or invest in a taxable account or pay taxes and convert a regular IRA to a Roth. I thought a Roth IRA is good because if you need the money, you can take the original amount back out. However I don't want to do that now. The sad thing is that I have a married older brother that makes almost twice as much money as me but he is always hard up for money due to his wife and kids and the debt she ran up. Sounds like a clone of shadowcat's former wife.
I have a budget that is more "strategic" than "tactical". It contains about eight items, and the amount I will spend on them for the entire year: "living Expenses"; Wife's 401(k); My SEP/IRA, etc. Because I am also debt-free, and only have to pay current expenses like groceries, electricity, telephone, etc., it makes a "big picture" budget like this more feasible than if I had a lot of individual monthly expenses. On a monthly basis, I fill in a chart that shows how close I am to goal on each item, and how much more money I need for each during the current year.
The only bad thing about this kind of annual budgeting method is that it looks scary this time of the year, as the numbers seem huge. One effect of this is that I tend to be very miserly during the beginning of the year, then loosen up as I start to meet the various goals. For example, I have only been to a strip club once this year (other than a brief trip to Thee Dollhouse, Tampa, on New Year's Day, and that wassn't "entertainment", but "research".
I hope to resolve this miserliness next week during a trip to the #2 TUSCL club.
I should kick myself. I did a very smart thing in December which was to move almost everything into money market accounts. Then in the last couple of weeks I've been buying stocks. I bought way too early though. Figures. I seem to be too early a lot of the time. Except for moving my money into money market accounts. I did leave my 401K alone. Not going to move it until May I believe when I read a market bottom will be reached. If I can believe one web site. Was hoping to see a small rally in January but not sure if it'll happen now. So I'm looking at ways to save more.
Though the latter is more difficult, psychologically, it's really a wiser way to lead your life. Rather than constantly denying yourself "what you want" because your budget won't let you have it (a failing proposition anyway), it makes much more sense to learn NOT TO WANT IT in the first place. "Your Money or Your Life" is a good way to think about this sort of thing. This book (Penguin, by Dominguez and Robin, in its umpteenth iteration) has a good method of tabulating "life energy" against your expenses, so that you learn to prefer to spend on things that you DO value.
The premise is, essentially, that you can learn to stop spending money where you DON'T WANT TO. For me, for example, I stopped wasting money on eating out at places that didn't please me; thus I had more money for rarer visits to extremely nice restaurants, a type of trip I prefer to take less often anyway, but my "undirected" spending had prevented me from spending as I liked because it was trickling away before I had control of it. By changing my DESIRES (basically, remembering at the McDonald's counter that this was a bad choice in the first place, rather than after-the-fact regretting it) I was able to move into doing what I wanted to do.
I really liked that system. But then I found strip clubs. And quite frankly, what I WANT to do is have 100% of my time and energy occupied by hot strippers. So, if I really were to get my spending in line with my real desires, I would just be screwing strippers and putting myself straight into bankruptcy. So, although I really appreciate the new world view that "reverse budgeting" like "Your Money or Your Life" offers, I don't find it applicable to my more base desires. I can't "control" my need for hot strippers.