This is the post I’ve been planning, and dreading, all season. Oh yes – the part where I tally up that list of everything I bought this year. Well, everything I remembered to write down, anyway. Here goes nothing!

Race Entry Fees – Total: $848

South Shore Triathlon: $102
Chicago Triathlon: $188
SheROX Naperville Triathlon: $85
She Bangs Triathlon: $95
Bunny Rock 5k: $44
Ravenswood Run 5k: $42
Proud to Run 5k – $31
C4 Miles: $34 (+ $10 donation)
Fleet Feet New Balance Women’s 10k: $32
Elvis is Alive 5k: $27 (+$10 donation)
Illinois Tour de Donut: $25
Bike the Drive: $54
Hot Chocolate 15k: $69

Next year: Only do South Shore and SheROX sprint tris; do not register separately for Chicago and let T2 handle that. Budgeted for 4 5k-type races at $40 a pop, plus Elvis is Alive. Drop Tour de Donut. Drop She Bangs in the incredibly disgusting Bangs Lake. New budget: $450.

Memberships/Training/Etc – Total: $965
T2EA pre-season Indoor Triathlon: $175
T2EA Chicago Triathlon: $75
CARA 2 year membership: $79
USAT 1 year membership: $39
CES Open Water Swimming 10 week class: $227
Get a Grip Cycles bike fitting (so so so worth it!!): $270
TriMonster post-season CompuTrainer class: $100

Next year: definitely T2 indoor tri and regular season tri. Won’t need a new bike fitting, won’t take the open water class that I never got to go to because the Park District forced a rescheduling that didn’t work for me. Won’t have to renew CARA, will have to renew USAT. Will probably do another post-season class of some kind. New budget: $390.

Clothing – Total: $621
Pearl Izumi tri shorts: $40
3 Adidas tech t-shirts: $20
3 The Finals swimsuits: $60
Aerotech Designs tri shorts and bike shorts: $73
Moving Comfort sports bra: $20 (clearance! wooohoooo!)
Moving Comfort shorts and sports bras: $150
Bike Nashbar bike gloves: $5
Moving Comfort sports bra: $50
Blueseventy Reaction Wetsuit: $120 (super awesome T2 discount, plus Fleet Feet rewards points – got this for less than half price! score!)
Zoot tri top: $30 (woohoo again for clearance!)
Nike singlet: $13
Speedo Vanquisher goggles: $15
Pearl Izumi bike gloves: $25

Next year: Will definitely need bras, but am good on shirts. Will need at least another pair of long compression tights for cold-weather running. Will also need warm wool socks for cold weather. Will probably need two pair of bike shorts, a windbreaker shell of some sort, and estimating 3 swimsuits and one pair of goggles. New budget: $415.

Accessories – Total: $1,440
Polar FT-7 heartrate monitor: $110
Chamois Butt’r: $12
Travel Trac II bike trainer, frame pump for bike, Clean water bottle: $203
Chamois cream and goggles anti-fog spray: $25
Foam roller: $24
Floor tire pump: $28
Cateye wireless bike computer: $60
Bike gel seat cover: $10
Floor tire pump that does not destroy valves: $25
Tifosi Root Beer sunglasses: $40
Sportwash: $10
Shimano SPD pedals, pedal wrench: $73
Shimano SPD-SL/SPD shoe adapter: $25
Bike shoes for spinning bikes: $45
Shimano SPD-SL pedals: $44
Bike multitool: $10
Allen wrench set: $6
Cateye Strada Double Wireless bike computer: $100
Water bottle cage: $10
Pedro’s Toothbrush: $6
Bike chain cleaner/lube: $11
CO2 inflator and cartridges: $32
3-bike rack for car: $160
iPhone armband: $20
Hydration belt and spare bottles: $40
2 pair of Yankz: $14
Clip-on electronic metronome: $14
TriSlide: $12
Bodyglide: $12
Brave Soldier antiseptic, lubricant: $25
SuitJuice: $15
The Stick: $50
Compression socks, compression leg sleeves: $90
Race number belt: $8
“Insurance” pair of Tifosi Root Beer sunglasses: $40
Bike chain cleaner kit: $30

Holy fucking shit. Next year: is there anything left in this category TO buy??? – Will need more lube, probably TriSlide, Bodyglide, and Brave Soldier. Will probably need another bottle or two of goggle anti-fog spray. Might buy a handheld water bottle for running, will probably need to grab a couple bike water bottles. May buy a chip band. At least I’m pretty well set on electronic gadgetry, as long as I don’t fuck up and lose my bike computer a second time (ugh, that SUCKED). New budget: $200.

Books – Total: $100
Triathlon for Ordinary Mortals, The Non-Runner’s Marathon Trainer – $28
Training Weight: $12
Off Season Training: $4

Well now. Obviously I just wasn’t writing these guys down, since I have at least several other books. So I’m just doubling what I put down, as my real amount spent this year. Next year: Will probably be similar. New budget: $100.

Shoes – Total: $300
Brooks Adrenaline GTS 11: $100
Nike Zoom Structure: $100
Vibram Five Fingers Sprint: $100

My current shoes should get me through my half-marathon in January with no problem. After that, I may have to buy three more pair through 2012. New budget: $300.

Nutrition – Total: $100
This one’s just an estimate. But I think it’s a pretty good one.

Will probably be about the same next year, as well. New budget: $100.

All told, I spent — at least — $4400 this year on my triathlon pursuits, not counting my $1500 bike, the gas to drive to suburban races, or the amount of my fundraising minimum I’m going to have to pay out of pocket to T2 if I don’t raise the rest. So my $2000 budget for next year is looking pretty rosy, in comparison. Also, I will have some more Fleet Feet rewards points to use, and my REI dividend should be nice and fat next year, so hopefully those will stretch the budget a little extra.

It could always be worse. I hear the average that people spend to compete in an Ironman is $15,000…

i am going to go ahead and spend $30 registering for the annual ohio soapers gathering — my spring trip out to ohio that i’ve done every year for about the past 8 or so, which i was going to have to cancel this year because my bio class had a mandatory test scheduled that day. but today i was talking about the class to some friends (and how, frankly, i don’t see how i can get a C based on how awful i am doing on his tests — i don’t get it; i’m not accustomed to failing, and frankly it’s pissing me right off, but apparently i can’t cope with his tests), and as the rest of the class is basically a test a week from here on out and there’s no credit /but/ tests … although i feel a bit like a failure for giving up, it seems like torturing myself to continue on going if i’m not going to pass. so i’m going to go in tomorrow and, before my math class meets, drop the bio class, which if nothing else frees up my saturdays so i can go out to ohio and see my friends. and technically, that’s not til may so i won’t even have to buy gas for the trip this month. ;)

i haven’t entirely stopped buying things, though, to be perfectly honest. i had to register for my first depaul class, which was $300, on top of the $25 fee to process my application. plus i had to pay for my car insurance this month, which was almost $500. these are not discretionary expenses, though, so they don’t count against me… but they are moderately disappointing as, to be honest, i was kinda going in to this thinking that at the end of the month, i’d have the vast majority of my monthly funds left in my checking account ready to be ogled. i had put aside money for the insurance — i actually have what i call my “irregular expenses fund,” which is basically an accounting of annual/etc fees i have to pay (car insurance, sox tickets, amazon prime fee, consumer reports subscription, etc — stuff that comes up in chunks once a year, basically), all averaged out, and i save a monthly “bill” towards paying for that stuff. so the car insurance was covered by that, not my regular monthly spending money, but still, $500 in expenses is a bit sad to have coincident with, … pretty much trying not to spend $500 chunks.

i have been able to successfully avoid a bunch of other spending i normally wouldn’t think too much about, though. i’ve been really wanting to go on a perfume hunt — i have a gardenia scent that i really love, but it’s by Crabtree and Evelyn and they discontinued it several years ago (i actually picked this bottle up while browsing through shops in brighton, so that’s been a while now), and i’m running low and want to find a replacement, but i know if i go in to macy’s and find a saleslady to help me find a replacement, i’ll be dropping like $100 or something. so i’ve continued putting that off even though i really miss being able to wear gardenia. (curse you, C&E, you always discontinue my favorites! i’m still mad about Veranda!) and now i’m out of iTunes credit so i’m stuck without being able to buy any new music, and i really want to pick up an album by this one indiepop group out of Montréal, so that’s annoying. also i really frigging want to be able to buy coffee on my way to work again. i know it’s a horrible waste of money, but dammit, i like dunkin donuts coffee!

i guess it’s a useful exercise. i do like feeling a bit cat-who’s-got-the-cream about my magnificent self-restraint. and i do like not having my quicken insights page have increasing red-print amounts on my credit cards (not carrying a long-term balance, but still, i habitually make all my regular purchases on my cards, so between pay-periods they accumulate charges which i have to stare at and feel guilty because it’s red-print numbers next to a credit card account name). and i definitely like not acquiring more stuff. i spun up a bag of louet pencil roving i’d had for most of a year, and started on a second, so that’s almost like being able to buy yarn, kinda, i guess… except it’s way more awesome yarn because i spun it up by hand — ha, take that, Lorna’s Laces. (just kidding, Lorna’s, you know i love you!) that’s even a net loss on the stuff front, since the finished yarn takes up less room than a bag of roving – win! i was kind of thinking, actually, of trying to continue Buy Nothing Month into may. it’s not so bad really, not having the coffee, i guess. and next month, hey, no car insurance due, so i might actually save money…

at the end of the day, though, madonna just bought a $40m townhouse today, so all things being equal, i don’t feel so bad about my $35 groceries.

I’m going to try and go a whole month without buying anything*. No breakfast muffin on the way to work, and no books. No groceries either. Well, maybe an exemption there for the produce section; you can’t take my bananas away from me. But mostly no groceries. No yarn and no cleaning supplies and no yummy hand lotion from The Body Shop and no clothes. No coffee on my way to class. No iTunes (oh, ouch).

I’m not having a panic-oh-my-god-i-have-to-save-money event. I’m just curious to see if I can do it. What’s the worst that can happen here: I clean out my freezer and use up a bunch of crap I already have?

* – Well, anything except Tiger’s diabetes supplies and cat food and stuff. Insulin’s 28-day usable lifespan waits for no one’s attempt at social engineering herself for entertainment.

FYI, HTH, HAND. Jerks.

so while i am not saying that i wouldn’t mind having an extra four grand laying around, i think it has all worked out pretty favorably. also, the view from my balcony is fantastic.

(a) keep plugging away, because someday your car is going to need repairs and boy are you going to be pissed if you have to put it on your discover card;
(b) say ‘fuck it, this is pointless,’ and blow a scad of cash on a fun vacation you’ve been wanting to go on for years, because hey, at least your worthless money can buy you an experience?

currently leaning towards (b). i mean really. i am being a good little responsible citizen here, and this is my reward for not buying a half million dollar condo and wall to wall plasma televisions with money from a bank that’s underwater and drowning fast — to have what i do have made worthless? disheartening.

are they not super fantastic?

and so i decided that i was not going to give up. i searched piperlime and nordstrom and macy’s and all of them had them but not in my size. and i grew despairing and wailed with impotent rage, until i found that … amazon apparently sells shoes. (seriously, who knew.) and they had my size! and they will arrive at chez niqui on tuesday!

SHOES SHOES HAPPY HAPPY PRETTY SHOES DAY TO ME!!!! SHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOESSSSSSSSSS!
*beams*

so every morning i got up and got a cup of coffee and stared forlornly at my quicken insights page, certain that if i just kept looking at it i’d find something to do, but i never really did. which left me to find a new challenge.

one of the tools that i learned to use in pursuit of debt-freedom was budgeting. quicken provides a pretty badass budgeting system, if you really get into it (which i have) — i categorize everything as accurately as i can, down to splitting up department store receipts into different amounts for clothing, books, household, etc. and i’ve had several years of refining my budget so by now i’ve got it pretty well laid out, so i know exactly when things like auto insurance are about to hit me, and i know how much i’m willing to spend on groceries, etc. — for example, i have $27 left for groceries for the month of june. (of course, i’m also over budget on charity by like $400 because i went all willy-nilly with the plastic, what with all this exciting flooding going on lately, so it all works out.) so having the budget in place (and super-micromanaging it; you should have seen my sexxxy spreadsheets from when i was considering moving and trying to figure out what my budget was) allows me to move forward on my next two major goals: (1) save a pile of cash, and (2) donate a pile of cash. (granted, (1)’s pile is significantly larger than (2)’s, but that’s only because i’m a selfish pig.) i’m trying to save substantially for retirement, to make up for the time lost when i was trying to pay off my debts, and i’m also trying to save up a substantial emergency fund in case of disaster (3 months salary). i’m actually saving something like 21% of my gross income (except for the part where 3/4 of that is pre-tax and the rest is post-tax, so it works out to something more like 24% really), and am bringing home substantially less cash than i was last year. and as last year i donated the value of roughly 2.3% of my taxable income to charity (that counts in-kind donations; my never-ending crap-to-the-Brown-Elephant trips), my goal for this year is 3%. so far, i’m at about 1.2%, so i have a little ways to go on that.

the end result of all this saving and donating is, amusingly, being dead broke again. because i decided to adopt the philosophy advocated for by a number of personal finance flaks, that every dollar should be assigned to something and none should go just wandering about (because that way lies unchecked spending), i wind up allocating my entire monthly income (absent about $15-25/mo for ‘slop’) in my quicken budget. on the upside, i know exactly when my phone bill just came in $3 higher than usual (usually because of CTAAlerts text messages); on the downside, this does still cause some stress, especially at the end of the month (i need to go grocery shopping tomorrow; are you kidding me, $27 for groceries???). but, evidently without financial stress, i get bored and annoyed, and just go stir some up anyways, so i might as well plan for it.

but even doing it deliberately because you want to and not because you have to, being extremely neurotic about budgeting gets old. so i’ve started to branch out a little bit. my latest PF project is the quote-unquote grocery game — thegrocerygame.com — basically, coupon clipping + careful watching of store sales + strategic buying, to result in the cheapest possible grocery bill. like, families of 2 adults and 2 teens spending $40/week on groceries — that sort of craziness. i’m not really doing it yet; the common advice seems to be that before you sign on for the 4 week free trial of the matchup service (about $5/mo thereafter; in combination with the Sunday Tribune, this “game” costs $12/mo to play), you should save up 4 weeks’ worth of coupons, so you have an adequate selection to work with. so tomorrow will be my third Sunday paper, and i already have a pretty respectable coupon stash at this point. neither jewel nor dominick’s offer double- or triple-coupon promotions (i checked!), which is unfortunate, but i have high hopes for being able to score good prices anyways, and thereby reduce my out-of-pocket expenses even further. the cleverest thing is, i think, that if you get good enough at this, you can start pulling in stuff for free on a somewhat regular basis — and so my plan here is to not just shop for stuff i will actually use myself, but also shop for free/dirt cheap stuff, with the express intent of donating it to the Greater Chicago Food Depository. apparently a lot of the stuff you can get for free is personal care stuff like toothpaste and soap, which the food bank also takes — i don’t go through much toothpaste living by myself, and obviously i don’t need soap from anyone :-) but if it’s free, hell yes i’ll take it and promptly go donate it. that is an awesome game. so i’m really sort of champing at the bit to get all my coupons in order and get to play the grocery game. TWO WHOLE WEEKS LONGER!! WAAAAH.

anyways, the net result of all this fussing about should be that, at the end of this year, i will have roughly 60% more in retirement savings than i had at the beginning of the year (all in contributions, given the way this $^%&*^%$#$%^& market is going — my existing retirement funds have been stagnant all year, and boy is it making me cranky), and hopefully i will be at least halfway, if not more, to achieving my 3-months-salary goal.

and then i wonder what my goals will be on 43Things?

by the time i realized what it had been, i was already halfway past it to the door, and i thought it would look weird if i went back and picked it up. and what would i do with it anyways? but, what if someone else picked it up and used it to steal the person’s identity, or something? i could have prevented that possibility, if only through not personally being an identity thief (or ordinary sort of thief). i dithered over the dilemma all the way up to the pharmacy and, as i ponied up the $33 for my cat, i decided that if it was still there on the way out i would pick it up.

it was, so i did.

it’s someone’s debit card, in fact. losing a debit card is worse than losing a credit card — for one thing, you’re on the hook for more cash; for another, if someone does use your debit card you lose *real* money immediately, you don’t get the luxury of sitting on hold with your credit card bank waiting for them to straighten it out, when the bill won’t come for another 20 days. so, i’m glad i picked it up. i hope it was not too late for the person, that he had just dropped it and no one else had used it and discarded it in the meantime.

but then i realized: i have no idea what to do with it. i thought about turning it in at the jewel customer service desk, but then — *they* might steal it. (yes, i’m a suspicious sort of girl.) and besides, they’re probably not going to go back to jewel looking for it anyways, just because they’re probably not going to know where they lost it. after that, my first instinct is to hand it in to the bank, but … i, quite frankly, do not want to have my name in any way associated with this card, because if it turns out it was stolen, they will need someone to blame, and i do not want to be blamed. so that’s out. i thought about anonymously mailing it back to the bank, but what are they going to do with it and with my statement that “i found this at 7PM on wednesday at jewel, please send the person a new card since they lost it”? they’re a giant bank, they’re going to (a) fuck it up, or (b) get hopefully confused and do nothing. so that option sucks. i can’t contact the actual person, obviously, and even if i could, that gets back again to not wanting to be associated with a lost card in case i get put on the hook for something. so, i guess, in the end, although i wish i could save this person the bother of having to order a new debit card from his bank (and save him the worry of, in the meantime, hoping desperately no one found it and stole his money), i guess that in order to protect myself, the best solution is actually just to stuff the card through my shredder and forget about it.

still, it seems like there ought to be a better way.

it sort of eases the pain of realizing that the apartment you’ve come to see about possibly renting has not actually been cleaned since 1983 (CLOSET SHELF VISIBLE GRIME EW EW EW), was designed by a band of methamphetamine-crazed monkeys, and is apparently managed by people who are quite serious about the fine art of hostile slackerdom but not so much the art of not having water-damaged ceilings. (but on the bright side, i could have waved at bingo and whirl‘s house from my windows.)