I’m starting to try to take a harder look at my budget, or in this case a complete and total lacking of the same.  I realized after I got home last night that by eating out for all three meals yesterday that I spent somewhere around thirty dollars on food alone.  For one day.  That’s about a tenth of my take home pay.  That actually made me sick to my stomach.  Well.. I will go out on a limb here and guess that the McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and Zaxby’s had something to do with it as well.  Oh, and pro-tip: when eating a Rolaids from the roll be sure to remove the foil paper before chewing.  That can’t be good for my gastric system.  Anyway.  I’m currently looking at Mint as something to try and get my spending under control.  The site seems interesting enough; I like how it tracks and categorizes what sort of things you spend on.  Now, if it would only have a way to link to my actual checking account bank then things would be best.  They have a link to my bank.. but only the investments section.  I emailed their support group that adds institutions and am currently waiting on a response.  Another budgeting tool I’m looking into is envelope budgeting.

Envelope budgeting is a more old fashioned way of going about things in a somewhat backwards fashion.  Rather than looking at how much you can’t spend you pay attention to how much you need to set aside.  It’s essentially the same thing as your basic budget of knowing that you have to keep at least blah amount in the bank for bleh amount of bills but you take money each payday and set it aside into envelopes (real or virtual, depending on what works for you) for future spending divided into categories like bills, groceries, et cetera.  I’m looking at setting up a system where I have this envelope thingie set aside, one for each of my major bills and one that will be for the combined amount of my smaller bills and then one for food and one for gas.  When I look in my envelope for food and see that until I have more put in (at the next pay day) that I only have say fourteen dollars well, that’s all I have left to spend on that till payday.  I acknowledge that the entire process is a purely mental exercise in doing the same thing as spreadsheet budgeting but somehow parceling everything off ahead of time makes more sense to me.  It’s actually an idea I’ve grappled with before sort of.  I have considered in budgeting before on how to set aside each paycheck the amount I would need to be able to pay upcoming bills.  For some reason the whole idea of dividing it up evenly for each paycheck within a period just never stuck.  Probably because I’m not the most financially wise person on the planet.

Only two semesters left of my undergraduate work at USC and I will receive my Bachelors in English.  That will be good.  Then in the summer of 2009 I think I’ll prep up and take the GMAT so I can attend graduate classes for linguistics.  If everything goes as I want I should be teaching English somewhere overseas in a few years.  If I have my Masters or PhD in linguistics then who knows how far I’ll be able to get.  I’m also considering taking the culinary classes that USC offers.  The price isn’t too bad and I think that being a better cook can only help me out in life.  We all need food, might as well know how to do it right, ya know?