Tremendous Blondette

Not the white or wheat variety, the green stuff. It pays your bills, enables your vices, and drives you crazy. If money belonged to a generational group, it would be a Millennial. It begs for guidance, discipline and rules. It feels entitled and seeks to please.

I wonder, where does my money go? I often times find I live paycheck to paycheck with no good reason. It’s simply because I fail to truly reign in my spending. As I paid bills this morning, alternately listening to my account activity on the hotline, submitting payments on the web, and tracking the debits in Excel, I wasn’t all that shocked to hear Starbucks, Subway, and QuikTrip repeated.

I’m paid semi-monthly (basically on the 15th and 30th of each month- or as close as possible to those days.) I divide my bills per paycheck and even reorganized a few to make sure I’d have the cash to cover. I wish I was paid all at once and could just pay all bills straight off the bat and manage the remaining funds from there. But that is not the case, so I must work with what I’ve got. I have a spreadsheet that lists all expenses (fixed and variable) and if only I would stick to it, I’d be much more at ease.

Much of my money goes to coffee, dining out, and gas. My money goes to convenience- LAZINESS- indulgence. It’s time to be more responsible. It’s time to make my own freaking coffee and take it to work (main reason I stop off at Starbucks or Latte Land is because the work coffee is awful -even when I am the brewmaster- and it takes time), it’s time to start cooking and budgeting meals (it’s healthier anyway- and maybe I can still walk to the City Market to eat.) Gas, well, that would involve carpooling which I’ve done before and found I still spent as much on gas.

Where does your money go? Are you managing it? Guiding it? Nurturing it?