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Color Experiment

April 10th, 2015 at 12:44 pm


Hypothesis: If green is the color that you want to maintain, how long will you be able to avoid red?

I have a bad habit. I end-load my desired payments to whatever the day of payday. Essentially, if I spend more than what I am planning, the end-load payment is obviously decreased. Makes sense?

This two week period I've front-loaded the payment and am "Paying ourselves first."

And I was amazed at how my spending habits/patterns changed when we were down to our last cash this week after time away. We made it with $.30 to spare. The cupboards are a bit barer and we ate cereal for dinner last night.

Today I am taking my cash for the week out of the ATM. No debit card usage this go around. I am hoping to be pretty accurate on how much I target to spend.

So this week it is all GREEN. Inconvenience will be going into the gas station to prepay for gas. And that really isn't an inconvenience.

This week to save money I:

- Bought cereal on sale at Walgreens and using a coupon paid less that $1.50 per box. This is an area I'd like to improve on - boxes of sugary crap cereal should really be gone.
- Bought one of the required text books for my class and have requested the remainder through inter-library loan.
- Requested generic Flonase through the Pharmacy instead of paying 3x as much OTC

Hoped for outcome of this week:

Spending in the $150 to $175 range and putting an additional $200 toward retirement.


Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

5 Responses to “Color Experiment”

  1. LivingAlmostLarge Says:
    April 10th, 2015 at 01:38 pm 1428673083
    1428673083

    Good Luck. Sounds good to me. Paying myself first has always been my mantra. I'm a terrible budgeter because I never feel i can spend what I budget for food. So rather just knowing I have save X% and paid all bills and I have $1k to spend on food, clothes, fun is easier.

  2. creditcardfree Says:
    April 10th, 2015 at 02:34 pm 1428676463
    1428676463

    Yes, paying first is a good plan. Budget with what is left.

  3. VS_ozgirl Says:
    April 10th, 2015 at 05:04 pm 1428685461
    1428685461

    That's a nice perspective to have, good luck with it Smile

  4. FrugalTexan75 Says:
    April 11th, 2015 at 03:40 am 1428723635
    1428723635

    Hope you have lots of Green left! Smile

  5. snafu Says:
    April 11th, 2015 at 12:41 pm 1428756111
    1428756111

    Breakfast idea: Would you consider offering breakfast muffins or breakfast cookies instead of cereals? There are lots of choices from on-line recipe sites; these a healthy with limited sweetener, possible honey or applesauce replacing most of the sugar. We delegated this task to DSs when they were still living at home. I now make a couple of batches and trow them in the deepfreeze since it just takes a few seconds to zap in microwave. I suggest doubling the paper cupcake holders to make them sturdier 'to go'

    I noticed that some folks who regularly use sweet cereals decant them into a large size Rubbermaid flex top canisters to make it easy to add an equal amount of regular cereal like 1/2 Frosted Flakes, 1/2 store brand Corn Flakes.

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