|
I'm impressed and happy that you weathered your introduction to BFC in the newbie finance thread and have decided to come back and make your own. Looking forward to seeing you tackle all this.
|
#
¿
Jul 19, 2015 00:31
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 09:45 |
|
|
Yeah, retirement contributions outside of getting the match should be off the table
|
|
#
¿
Jul 19, 2015 02:49
|
|
|
It's hard to define for someone else what is "fun money" vs a "necessary expense". Certainly there's an objective standard somewhere--you're in no place to buy plane tickets to Hawaii--but it's also not the case that you need to e.g. go pick up another job and never do so much as touch a video game, watch a tv show, play miniatures with friends, etc. Recreation is important, even in the depths of debt. With that said, maybe you can answer the question yourself. If I said "you can't spend a dollar on fun money for three months", what would that mean to you? What purchases would you be avoiding?
|
|
#
¿
Jul 19, 2015 07:01
|
|
|
signalnoise posted:Games and game accessories I'd suggest trying to go 90 days without purchasing any gaming stuff. You can even set a target for yourself upon successful completion (e.g. $100 on day 91). If you can't go 3 months without buying any new gaming stuff, it raises the question of why you spend money on it at all. Presumably you've been buying gaming stuff for quite awhile, so if you can't make it 90 days without buying something new it's a real indictment of both your past purchases (why'd you buy it if you got bored of it so quickly?) and your future ones (aren't you just going to cast this aside in the near future?).
|
|
#
¿
Jul 19, 2015 08:07
|
|
|
I'm confused, signalnoise. When you first posted in the newbie thread you expressed resistance towards estimating future expenses because you don't have a baseline. Now in here you're refusing to use your past habits as a baseline to estimate future spending. Maybe there's a third way of budgeting that I'm unaware of, but it looks like you've shot down the only two ways to actually make a budget. I suppose if you really feel unprepared to proactively budget at this stage you could spend a month or two meticulously tracking expenses and use those as your baseline come October or whatever, but that would strike me as needless delay for a necessary step in fixing your financial situation. When I clicked for your post history in the newbie thread I noticed that you had visited back in late 2013. Here's an exchange that I think is useful to apply to your current situation (all emphasis mine): signalnoise posted:I am really, really lovely with impulse spending. I would like to get some way to limit my spending to an allowance in such a way that I have to do something out of the ordinary to go beyond that limit, so it resonates with me better. Right now I am considering getting a prepaid debit card, but I'm wary of them because they generally cost money every month to use. I definitely need my allowance to be able to be spent on the internet though. Remy Marathe posted:If you've got truly addictive behavior going on, as soon as you trample a boundary you've set yourself a couple of times that bad feeling will wear off and you'll just be back where you started with a slightly more complicated system. It's great you're fighting a bad habit, but in my experience setting up mousetrap-like prevention mechanisms doesn't work for long, if anything it's reinforcing your acceptance that you are too weak to restrain yourself and offloading the responsibility for your behavior to external forces. In conditioning terms, normal consequences so far have been too far removed to "condition" you to learn impulse control. The second your brain spots that a card rejection isn't the end of the world, especially online, in fact has very little consequence and only requires some shuffling of money, kiss that fragile barrier protecting you from yourself goodbye. signalnoise posted:Thanks for this, this is probably really what I need to hear Maybe it's apples and oranges, but I don't think so. I think what's going on is that you're setting up gimmicks to avoid confronting your problems head on. The spendy part of your brain loves these gimmicks and excuses--"I can't look at past expenses cause then I'll anchor off it"--because it can use them to undercut the responsibility part of your brain. My suggestion is to go back through the last couple months expenses and categorize everything. Far from weakening your financial mindset as you fear, I predict this will strengthen your resolve. You will have demonstrated to yourself that you have the willpower to confront the negative emotions associated with your past spending, not to mention the fact that you have the perseverance to complete a somewhat boring but absolutely vital task. Understanding your recent past spending will give you a shot of confidence and position you really well to take on the problems you came in here to fix.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 20, 2015 13:50
|
|
|
signalnoise posted:You make some good points. After work I'll sort through my Mint account. Great. Don't feel like you need to do the whole 2-3 months in one sitting. Instead, commit to 10 or 15 minutes, plus however long it takes to track today's spending. Then repeat the process daily until you've worked back far enough. It's important to form good money habits, and creating a small but regular routine that accomplishes meaningful work every time ("today I spent 15 minutes reconstituting a week of spending") is an effective way to train your brain into new habits. The first week will be hardest from a mental effort standpoint, but stick with it for 7-10 days and all of a sudden spending a little time every day to track spending will feel much more natural.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 20, 2015 15:26
|
|
|
Duckman2008 posted:Well, at his point the house is purchased, so it sucks that it may not have been fully thought through, but nothing to do about it now (as far as I know). Yeah badgering them about the house purchase doesn't add much here imo. Better to help them get a handle on their regular spending + stay within their means for furniture and other new homeowner stuff.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 20, 2015 22:46
|
|
|
Formatted for better legibilitycode:Also, how do the unknowns get designated that way? Are those cash transactions, or CC transactions with weird names (e.g. sometimes I'll buy something from a national chain but it will ring up under the corporate parent name in a different state, so I can't tell what it actually is), or what's going on? In any event now that you're actively tracking hopefully there will be very little "unknown" in the future. pig slut lisa fucked around with this message at 08:24 on Jul 25, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Jul 25, 2015 08:22
|
|
|
I'm not sure that rule will be as easy for you to follow as setting a hard numerical limit. You mentioned that you have YNAB so you're going to be setting that limit anyway...might as well figure it out now and post it in here ti be held accountable at the end of August. Also, signalnoise posted:It's from shopping on Amazon and being too lazy to look up what I bought That's like a 5 minute task. Come on man.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 25, 2015 15:28
|
|
|
signalnoise posted:The hard limit, right now, is 100 bucks a week on stuff that's purely bullshit hobby stuff. I'm trying to also work in "don't buy what you won't use immediately" to stop maxing out every week. The plan then is see how much I spend when I'm not buying stuff I won't use, and reduce the cap. $5,200 a year on hobby stuff seems insanely high when you have nearly twice that much credit card debt and a backlog of already purchase hobby stuff you haven't even touched. Have you read this article I posted in the newbie thread? http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/04/18/news-flash-your-debt-is-an-emergency/
|
|
#
¿
Jul 25, 2015 15:36
|
|
|
signalnoise posted:Unintended upside to this budget: I no longer have enough spending money to smoke That's good to hear. Smoking is expensive as hell. Best wishes as you try to quit.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 4, 2015 06:14
|
|
|
signalnoise posted:Talked that poo poo out with my wife and it's all good because we're chill people Can we see the budget?
|
|
#
¿
Aug 7, 2015 06:53
|
|
|
signalnoise are you going to have some kind of August spending numbers next week, and/or a September budget?
|
|
#
¿
Aug 28, 2015 13:27
|
|
|
Hell yeah it's August spending recap and September budget day woooo
|
|
#
¿
Aug 31, 2015 16:27
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 09:45 |
|
|
signalnoise posted:Bring lunch to work at least 3/5 days a week I'm going to ask on Friday how you two did with this one. Good goal and realistic, too.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 1, 2015 03:14
|
|