Cracking Down on Spending

It’s already widely known that in order to control and cut down on your spending, you need to know where it’s all going in the first place. I’ve tried my darnedest to keep track of what I’m actually spending my money on since I started attacking my debt, with the use of various categories in my ClearCheckBook account. Fine and swell, but it ain’t worth a damn to just enter the information if you don’t look at the results of all that data afterwards. This is exactly why I’ve always been blowing my budget every month.

Since I started using YNAB, it finally hit me like a brick to the face (Andrew W.K. style) where my spending leaks are. It doesn’t quite make sense, as I just use a general “Misc Spending” category in YNAB for my monthly spending money, but whatever, let’s just go with it. It’s actually more to do with knowing on a regular basis how much I’ve spent for the month, what’s left, and – most importantly – calculating what my remaining cash works out to on a daily basis ($10.68/day in an ideal month).

Now that I’ve got a target number, all it takes is to think about what I spend my money on in a typical day. Queue the screeching brakes sound effect here. Every day, $4.50 or so for a pack of cigarettes (the cheap ones, too! Thanks Obama!), and pretty much every weekday, $6-$7 on lunch at work. There’s ten or eleven bucks right there, every day, which leaves quite a bit of nothing left over for spending on anything else. Gosh, gee, no wonder I bust the bank every month. Genius.

Since I’ve got a simple situation, thankfully it provides for simple solutions. As far as hitting McD’s every day at work, I’ll instead be packing. This used to entail a couple of apples, and before that, a couple of oranges, but they’re not filling. In fact, the apples always left me even hungrier a half hour later. It’s PB&J from now on (assuming I give myself enough time to actually make any before work). That’s a quick $130 or so a month in savings. It should also get me back to not clocking out for lunch, thus recouping all that lost overtime, again, like I wrote about months ago.

As far as the cigarettes, of course the obvious answer is to quit. Been there, read the book, got the shirt… sent a postcard? Lacking the willpower for that option, the next best thing is going back to making my own. I still have my old machine, so all I needed was a pound of tobacco and a box of tubes. I was expecting to spend around $40 on a pound, thanks to the wonderful $24 SCHIP tax (an increase of some 2000% or so). Well, much to my astonishment, many of the manufacturers have stopped dealing in cigarette tobacco for just that reason, and are instead promoting their pipe tobacco lines, as are the stores. Apparently this is old news, and I’ve been living under a rock. I did a double-take when the clerk rang up my order, and assumed I had been the beneficiary of somebody else’s mistake. It took a day for me to realize that I had bought a bag of pipe tobacco. Shit, fuck! Did my research, turns out the only difference is the cut (and learned, as stated above, that I’ve been living under a rock). Sweet! I still would’ve been saving money at $40/pound, but this is just… awesome.

I just ran the numbers, including the price of both the tobacco and the tubes, and assuming a pack a day I’ll be saving almost $100/month on cigarettes now. That’s $230 out of my monthly $325 that can be spent on better things, or worse things, or carried over into my debt snowball. Nitty gritty is below.

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