My budget

I have been tracking my expenses since moving to Evanston in the end of August. I don’t have much income in school, and I wanted to evaluate my spending to help me decide whether I need to get a summer job or maybe take out some loans. I’m going to use this blog as a further commitment mechanism to make me track my expenses and keep them reasonable.

I picked my monthly budget amounts before I started tracking my expenses, and changed them slightly after September. My original budgets for groceries, eating out, drinking and clothing were $300, $100, $50, and $20. After a month tracking them I realized they could be adjusted. In addition to my monthly budget items, I also have yearly budget items of school supplies, local travel (mandatory cta-pass purchase), travel home, and fun travel which have yearly budgets of $480, $240, $600, and $960. My September, October, and November aggregated expenses by monthly budget category are below.

I am not concerned that I was way over budget in September. It was my first month in Evanston and I had a lot of atypical expenses because of that. I did keep a separate moving category, but that did not include everything I had to pay for because it was my first month.

I am slightly concerned about the eating out and drinking categories. In both October and November I was over budget in the categories. The reason I hesitate raising the budgets is that both of those categories in both October and November were characterized by under budget spending for 90% of the month, and then way over budget spending for 1 weekend each month when I had friends visiting. In October I spent just over $100 on eating out and drinking in the last 2 days of the month when I had visitors, compromising about half of my spending that month on those categories. In November I spent $85 on eating out and drinking over 3 days when I had visitors.

I don’t think I will have visitors this frequently in the future, so I am not raising the budget yet. I’d also like to try to spend less even when I do have visitors. December is not going to be an informative month because I will not be in Chicago for half of it, but January and February should be more like typical months. I will probably wait until the end of February when I will have 6 months of expenses recorded to adjust my budget further. I suspect I will be able to decrease the groceries budget by $20 or $30.