July: Monthly Totals

I just got my last purchase of the month in—a $2.31 Magnum 40 to help kill this caffeine buzz (don’t read as: pain) that I suddenly have—at 11:33pm, 07/31/2007, and here’s how the monthly totals for July look:

Bills: $422.00
As stated at the beginning of the month, this included rent, utilities, phone, student loans and a minimum payment on my credit card. This probably won’t fluctuate all that much, at least not until winter when we have to actually use heat, though for the next three months we have to pay a portion of our last month rent that I guess we didn’t pay before. But even that divided by four is only $60 or so more.

Alcohol: $139.90
This includes two shows at the Mohawk Place, one free show at Thursday at the Square, at least one night out per weekend and a surprisingly low one trip to La Luna for its open bar on Wednesday. Averaged out this amounts to about $35 a week, which sounds pretty standard to me even though this total also includes a bachelor’s party and a graduation party that I don’t envision being in my regular monthly expenditures. However, I’m bound to take up a couple more Thursday at the Squares than I did last month and spend another night or two out on the weekends to keep this in about the same range.

Sub-total, Free Beers: 47
Like I said, you can’t put a price on good friends. Or free beers for that matter either.

Food: $107.97
As outlined in an earlier post, my diet consisted of nothing different should I have been spending five times more money: there’s only so much I know how to make and, of that, so much that I want to eat. Between the staples of my diet I managed to mix and combine them enough to last an entire month without getting sick of any of them. Nope, not even the 5am goulash that I made last Saturday night.

Dine-in/Take-out: $32.59
Separate from the food bill because of its unnecessary (except late at night) nature, almost guilty pleasure status and its, well as the kids would call it, “being a treat,” this mostly includes small trips to McDonald’s, though it also includes two great breakfasts—one at Nick’s Place and one at its cousin restaurant, Sophia’s—and, when including my credit purchases, two trips to SteakOut. Generally, I’m surprised I behaved myself so well in limiting myself to only this many meals out of the house, especially considering the regularity of being out late. Maybe I do, deep down, possess some form of temperance after all, though hopefully not so much. Like grace, you don’t want too much temperance or else you won’t be able to stand.

Miscellaneous Expenses: $34.62
This includes laundry and cover charges for the shows I went to over the month, though I also charged some purchases on a wrist brace ($18?) and $21 on gas ($21 more dollars on gas than I thought I’d spend). Thought I realize this is the category that can make or break my goal—no health insurance and a propensity to go out and ride my bike home, not to mention my already possibly broken or severely sprained wrist—I don’t see this being all that much higher: by getting rid of my car I had hoped to eliminate such expenses as much as possible. Though I know how, like nature abhorring a vacuum, life has a way of despising idealistic ventures, so I can’t say I would be surprised if I am wrong about this hunch.

Purchases on Credit: $123.17
To prevent double counting these purchases in a later month’s bill payments, I will keep this as a separate category though not figuring it into the monthly total. In all criticism of myself, I certainly do not intend to ever again crack the $100 credit mark and hope to eliminate the use of credit—surely I am un-American to say such a thing!—completely if at all possible.

TOTAL: $737.08
Total with Credit purchases (minus the payment made for previous credit purchases): $840.25

General outlook: the month wasn’t much different than what I envisioned, even if I have been slightly more of a hermit than I had hoped to be. Hopefully that will change in the next month. Still, I managed to go to two shows at the Mohawk, one at the Square, ate breakfast out twice, made a couple SteakOut visits, and, on the free side, constantly hang out with my friends (even had a great two hours of laughing and sitting on the porch with two of my roommates tonight), play Bid Pitch on a bi-weekly schedule, took multiple bike rides, enjoyed the garage sales resulting from the Garden Walk this past weekend, read under a tree at Bidwell Park and even found the time to finish reading (only) a couple of books.

Even if counting the credit purchases, which will obviously catch up with me and be accounted for (if I was to only pay the minimum over the course of the year and finish the year with credit card debt, I would then (obviously, I hope) include those purchases in my final yearly expenditure total), this would put me on pace to spend $10,083 over the course of the year.

This may not sound all that far below my allotted goal, but trying to spend $160 more a month, consistently, would be far more difficult for me than even Brewster (think Richard Pryor, not the Punky kind) would think. I’d have to buy new shoes and shirts to get that lavish.

Though that purchasing instinct of mine has been telling me to buy some new(er) shoes. Still, as the saying goes, I’m not buying. Right now I’m just hoping that medicine I bought tonight will help kill that caffeine buzz so I can sleep in this humid room.

As always, one night at a time.