the everyday adventures of sabrina

so, over the past several years i’ve been gradually getting better and better at managing my finances, and consciously working towards becoming more and more mindful of my money. mostly that was because of the credit-card debt i was working to eliminate, and finally did at the end of last year, but i found, freakishly, once that was dealt with, i actually missed micromanaging my finances. i was, literally, sticking with my habit of getting up in the morning and going in to quicken and planning out what to do… only, i didn’t have anything interesting to do anymore. i mean, without having to scrimp out exactly what i could throw at the credit card debt, and how that would affect the bottom line in terms of total interest paid and time to payoff, all i had to do was, like, not spend all my money. but my savings was deposited automatically, and that’s no fun. it doesn’t require any work on my part; therefore, it is boring.

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?