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On the subject of the Steam backlog, I found that my own impulsive Steam purchases ended in a hurry once I started holding myself accountable for all the games I had bought but never played. There was a day when I just went through my entire Steam library and started setting categories on all the games in there. The first category I made was "previously played" for games that I had run through at least once and might want to play again some time. There was another category called "garbage" which was self-explanatory and quickly grew to about a page long, and will probably grow a lot longer once I give my library another pass. Lastly, at the very top of the library list, was formed the "BACKLOG" category -- where games that I thought were genuinely worth playing would be kept close at hand until I was done with them. Every time I get the urge to make an impulse purchase on Steam, I notice that backlog, and notice Far Cry 3, Fallout New Vegas, GTA IV, Skyrim, and Dark Souls squatting in it, amongst other things that I keep meaning to play, sometime. It's surprisingly effective at blunting the urge to plunge for sweet deals and bloat my Steam library ever further.
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Jul 22, 2015 04:15
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 03:46 |
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COOL CORN posted:Ah okay, that makes more sense. I'm sure you know this, but eating from grocery stores is a lot cheaper than fast food. To toss in my personal experience with this: Before I started budgeting, I ate primarily at restaurants and was always wondering where all my money went. After I put together a budget and put a $100/month limit on my restaurant spending -- which I quickly discovered would be drained dry in a week if I kept up my past habits -- I decided to eat primarily at home, with a $300/month limit on groceries. That limit applied to everything that I buy at a grocery store: bathroom supplies, razor blades, cleaning supplies, and so on in addition to food items. That limit worked for as long as I was buying canned soup and frozen stuff and other "instants" for the majority of my food. When I started cooking for myself -- first the "helper" meals and stuff, then moving on to more elaborate things composed of scratch ingredients -- I quickly found that I was never hitting the $300/month limit at all; it became functionally a $200/month limit. My ability to scrimp further is somewhat hampered by a weakness for craft beer, and the fact that living alone means that the range of things I'm able to cook is limited by the perishability and reheatability of my ingredients and finished dishes. If I was living with someone I'd have more leeway to leave large amounts of leftovers that I could trust not to go to waste. Learning and perfecting new recipes is a ton of fun, spending lots of time picking produce makes you feel really smug, and trust me when I say that if all you've been eating is fast food all the time, a home cooked meal tastes loving amazing. I also hear the OP got himself an awesome new kitchen! 
Pittsburgh Lambic fucked around with this message at 13:42 on Jul 27, 2015 |
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Jul 27, 2015 13:35
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Stories like this get me tempted to start my own business selling miniatures and figuring out what advertising and psychological tactics will most effectively squeeze money out of my customer base. How often do you have to have a huge sale to make sure your customers don't fall out of the habit of checking your website and opening their wallets? How do you design the lore and composition of your minis to make sure that no matter how many your customers buy, they always feel like something's missing and need to buy more? How high can you price your minis before the customers stop calling it the grognard tax and start calling it boldfaced extortion? Do you even need to make an effort to sell paints and related supplies, or is it more profitable to just keep pressuring your customers to buy minis faster than they can paint them?
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Aug 6, 2015 05:19
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Most people don't run up 500-600 gigs of internet usage a month. It sounds to me like you're utilizing the internet heavily as a luxury, which is something to keep in mind as you budget. If you could cut back $50 a month on your internet bill in exchange for using the internet less, and choose instead to continue paying what you're paying for very high-grade internet service, that $50 a month is going to come out of your fun money. So if you were otherwise going to spend $150 a month on entertainment-related stuff, that's now $100. YNAB will even let you split the categorizations on your Comcast bill payment to show it coming partly out of utilities and partly out of entertainment, if you want to go that far. On the subject of the budget you posted, the first thing I wanted to ask was: Am I seeing right that there's a $1000 balance on your Delta AMEX? I thought you had paid that one off on account of it being your highest-interest card. Either way, my method when budgeting is to figure out the absolute necessities of life first, which it looks like you've partly done by filling in your utility costs. A $145/month electric bill is lovely, but I don't know how much of that is attributable to personal habits (sleepmode your computers when asleep/away instead of letting cookie clicker run, you goon) and how much of it is due to genuine necessities and issues with the house you're in. I just moved out of an apartment that was insulated so poorly that I could feel heat radiating through the walls within minutes of the A/C clicking off, so that sort of thing is at the front of my mind. You don't have any place on your budget for auto or homeowner's insurance, so you might want to start budgeting for those sorts of expenses as well. If your semiannual auto insurance payment is due in three months, for instance, budget a third of the payment each month. I personally also like to put a bit of money aside each month for regular and semi-regular auto maintenance, such as oil changes and the little stuff that comes along with those. Once you've figured that out, and decided on the amounts for other life necessities like groceries and fuel, I'd say start thinking about how you want to pay down your debts. Get the minimums keyed in for your student loan payment and your credit card payments, then look at how much cash you have left to budget. Figure out which of your credit cards you want to attack first. The two schools of thought are as follows:
Make your choice and decide how much money you want to pay toward that debt this month, keeping in mind how many more of such monthly payments it'll take to rid yourself of that debt. Balance your desire to spend money on entertainment against the very real, very pressing need to pay off those drat credit cards. Yes, this is going to be some austerity poo poo. Remember, in reply to your thread title: Adulthood is not something you purchase. Pittsburgh Lambic fucked around with this message at 06:18 on Aug 8, 2015 |
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Aug 8, 2015 06:08
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Not being able to cut down the monthly payments on the student loans sucks, but looking on the bright side, that'll only be a factor for as long as you have other items on your balance sheet that need to be paid down first. Google Docs is being lovely at the moment so I can't have another look at your debts, but if those credit cards are the only liabilities with a higher interest than your loan, the solution is to get those paid down quickly. After they're no longer a concern, it won't matter so much what the minimum payments on your student loans are, because they'll be your next target for repayment so you'll be paying more than the minimums on them anyway. Besides that, you'll have more money available then, without the credit card interest dragging you back.
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Aug 18, 2015 13:25
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Congratulations on your first full month of living on a budget! Please do not look at all the excess amounts in YNAB and then book one gigantic multi-split entry to zero them all out on one Amazon.com purchase of a plastic Collector's Edition Supplies Are Running Out Rank-4 Upgraded X-TIE Ugly Superfighter just before midnight rolls around. Seriously though, I'm looking forward to seeing how you did
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Aug 31, 2015 23:00
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Agreeing that you need to have a conversation about hair. There was almost as much spending on hair as there was on every non-restaurant "entertainment" purchase you made throughout the month ($176.55). Please don't take all your space marine minis out to the barbershop to get highlights. They look fine just the way they are.
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Sep 1, 2015 01:50
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Even though YNAB allows you to post inflows against expense accounts such as the T-Hobbies one, never do this. Never, ever loving slush your expense accounts. The only justifiable instance in which you might do this is if you have a specific account for reimbursable employer expenses that always, always zeroes after all money has come in and out. All you're doing by running a bunch of money in and out of your pony toy hobby expense account is hiding the real extent of your spending from yourself. Follow the YNAB rule. If you sell some toys and get some money for them, post that inflow as income for next month. See how you feel about spending the money after it's been sitting in Money Jail for a few weeks, then budget it accordingly. Spending is addictive as hell; you mentioned already that you're in withdrawal after having to endure a month of not getting your Amazon fix every single drat day. Good on you for that, by the way. Keep it up. But I'm going to go ahead and ask what exactly what went in and out of T-hobbies. If you posted any other inflows -- even refunds and deposit recoveries or whatever you might have -- against other expenses as well, I'm going to ask for those too. Don't ever post incomes against expense accounts to hide the true extent of your expenses. Pittsburgh Lambic fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Sep 1, 2015 |
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Sep 1, 2015 02:14
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Play that Professor Layton game whose name you already forgot too while you're at it. Bonus points if it's Professor Layton and the Plastic Thieves, in which our hero and his boy wonder assistant must solve the mystery of why some disgusting neckbeard's money keeps disappearing whenever he opens a gaming catalog.
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Sep 1, 2015 03:08
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Male Privilege is being completely oblivious to the cost of women's hair care.  On the subject of dining out: I'm just surprised OP didn't notice sooner how expensive that gets, given that he travels a lot and has to regularly total up all the restaurant bills on his expense reimbursements. Admittedly I can sympathize somewhat though, given that when I first started budgeting I too was surprised to see how quickly a $100/month restaurant allowance could dwindle away under my dining habits. Restaurant spending can and will gently caress your budget. I'll be looking forward to how your first week of bringing lunch to work plays out, too. Just don't be like the morbidly obese guy at my last job who took over all the breakroom microwaves every day to heat up 3 or 4 of those $3.50 apiece Atkins Low-Carb Diet frozen meals and shove them all into his mouth one after another. They weren't helping, even though he dumped a bag of pre-shredded cheese all over them every now and again.
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Sep 1, 2015 04:11
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Been awhile. How's the budget been holding together?
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Sep 21, 2015 00:49
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Looking forward to seeing your monthly budget summary, as well as hearing what your plan is for moving. I had been a bit curious as to how two people in a house of that size were paying that little for utilities; now I know that's just how much the house has been costing you while standing vacant. 
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Sep 30, 2015 12:21
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 03:46 |
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Hope the move went well
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Oct 4, 2015 22:54
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