Budget

I thought budgeting was unnecessarily limiting and just too hard to manage. However, I've been watching my friend and her budget and she seems to have less anxiety about spending money than I do, which is not what I expected. This is because she knows what she has and what she can spend and therefore if she wants to spend $50 on a manicure, she knows that she won't have to forgo something more important.

The other problem as I saw was management. I wasn't sure what categories to use and I didn't see me cataloging them well. I don't want to get into the business of downloading my bank statement data all the time and I really can't see myself writing everything down or (worse!) keeping receipts. So I found a techy solution.

I use iGoogle as a homepage so that I have easy access to weather, news, my calendar, email, and other things. So I looked for a gadget to add for expense tracking and found one. It is perfect for my needs. It has 10 categories and tracks your spending and automatically totals everything and compares to previous months/weeks.

So, now I'm on a budget. It's based on my previous salary, so hopefully I'll be saving some money too.