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.
My idea of budgeting is to look at the girls in a strip club and say, nope, no lap dance there. or "wanna dance?" No, her price is too high. What is yours?
I used to work on a home/living budget years ago and it worked out well. Budgeting helped me and the former wife become debt free and invest for our retirement. When I became debt free, I began to monitor/record monthly expenditures and do so to this very day, just to see where my money is going.
As far as clubbing, I pretty much go with what casualguy does.
Ah, I'm guilty of getting wildly overcharged in extra inside-the-club ATM fees once or twice. I always feel bad for the guy getting money out of those things while his chosen dancer waits nearby him and everyone is watching...it's sad to watch...
Retirement did two things, in my case. Limited the opportunities to visit clubs, and lowered the amount I spent and the "reserve" I used to have. Funny thing is, I have found I really don't miss it that much. I was, at one time, in the top 10 of reviews. Now, not even close.
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.
I go to clubs depending on how much cash I have to spend. In my line(s) of work I end up getting paid in a variety of under- and over-the-table manners. Usually strip clubbing expenses come out of a fat wad of $20s I've ended up with somehow.
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.
Besides my previous post on this topic, I am pretty damn sure I'm not going to make millionaires out of my daughter and son, when I pass! I may have made a few dancers millionaires though!!!!
Throughout my 27 years of marriage my wife kept me constantly behind the eight ball money wise. I worked all of the overtime that I was offered but no matter how much I made, she spent more. At the time of my divorce 3+ years ago I was in credit counseling and owed about $80,000 in credit card debt. Now with the exception of my home mortage, I am debt free. I do not have an ATM card. I have one credit card with a zero balance. I do not have a budget because I don't need one. I can live on half of my take home pay. And that was before I started drawing my full Social Security retirement pay last month and before the healthy pay raise I got this month. I do have a limited budget. 5% of my pay goes into my 401K. Each quarter I make a $5,000 payment on the principal of my home mortage. I always take more money than I expect to spend in a strip club and I have never come up short. One exception. I wrote a check for $1,000 to my favorite dancer as a gift. She could not cash it because it was an out of state check. She could not deposit in her joint checking account with her soon to be ex husband because he would have jumped on it. Wound up going to a local bank and getting a cash advance on my credit card. When I got home, I went on line and transfered $1,000 from my checking account to pay off my credit card. Cost? Less than a dollar. Keep that in mind when using ATM's. I'll be 66 on 1/13/08 and I know that when I retire that I will have to curtail a lot of my strip clubbing. As long as my health stays good, I am going to keep working.After a lousy marriage, I am finally having fun again.
Lol, lopaw. I was like that last weekend. One or two dancers thought I was drunk but I was just having fun because I had a lot of cash and wasn't worried about spending it. I wasn't throwing it around but I was walking all over the club and occasionally tipping dancers I was familiar with at a much higher frequency than many others.
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.
My first three years or so of clubbing, I blew money on strippers like Lopaw. Then, once I began to realize that the most fun I was having wasn't when I was spending the most, I cut back dramatically. I started following a loose monthly budget, but I eventually found that my skepticism over the benefits big spending brings made a precise plan unnecessary. For me, budgeting works best on a monthly or annual basis with the flexibility to go crazy every once in a while when the mood and opportunity come up.
I guess I am a child of my parents. They came to adulthoold during the depression, and while they were by no means stingy, they were frugal. I go to Vegas 3 times a year (including next week!). I never say "the limit this trip for gambling and strip clubs is $2000" but I do have some sort of internal mechanism that tells me when to shut down. I'll bet $25 on a basketball game, and be just as happy when I win as I would be had I bet $250. I'll find a dancer I really like, and spend $500 on her during an evening, not think twice about it, but it just isn't my nature to spend 3 hours in the VIP room swigging champaign and dropping something in excess of 4 figures. And I always leave looking forward to my next trip...as I am looking forward to hitting the Rhino in a few days!
Aside from adhereing to some common "gouges": (eg- don't spend more than 25% of income on rent, don't buy a car with sticker price > 1/3 your annual income, etc), I don't sweat the details that much. But, again, I don't splurge in proportion to various raises that I've had- I well recall certain "dry spells".
Do you mean budget in general or stripclub budget? In general yes, stripclubs, only in the general sense that it comes out of disposable income/fun money. I also usually have a general number in mind when I go into a club, and another number that I try not to go over, regardless of how much fun I'm having.
Yes congrats shadowcat. I missed that info that he was out of debt. I was planning on cutting back the number of dances but that went out the window this morning when a hot young blonde girl sat in my lap. I got 2 more on top of all the others I already had. I had fun though. So if my Roth IRA isn't maxed out for this tax year, I'll have pleasant thoughts of why not. I need to get back to studying what to invest my money in to get the best returns since that will take more money away from me than all the money I've spent in strip clubs.
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'm unemployed, but I'm not in debt, either. I have enough investments to mildly marginally live off of them if I stay with someone I know. Hopping from family member to family member has its advantages. I guess I gotta buckle down and be a grown up some day soon.
I work off an annual budget. Because I am self-employed, I also budget revenue coming in, which is good discipline, although I am almost always unduly pessimistic about how much I will make during the current year.
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 guess I'm going to try a temporary budget. I figured out how much money I can spend on tips, lap dances, etc. and I plan on cutting out a lot of it at least in one club. To avoid getting dancers upset, I plan on disappearing or not visiting that long. I'm sure they heard "maybe later" before. I don't feel poorer as a result of anything to do with my home mortgage but more like a result of the declining stock market and my desire to save more for a Roth IRA especially after some funds went down a lot more than I expected.
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.
There are two ways to budget -- dividing expenses into categories by how much you can afford to spend in a given field; or (less common) learning to want to expend money to an appropriate amount in each given field.
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.
I did manage to spend less money this past time. However I think some of that may have been due to the fact that the clubs were getting crowded and dancers had a harder time finding me. I only said no thanks or maybe later a few times. It's a whole lot easier to save money when the strip clubs are packed or full of people. However when one of your favorite dancers goes down on price by doing extra dances for free (2 songs were really short so I guess she didn't count those) it's get harder to say no to special lap dance prices.
25 comments
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.