Saturday, January 26, 2008

Old Goals, New Goals, Budgets and Looking Forward to February

I realized as I was looking over this blog that I never posted my budget for January or my Budget results for December. Shame on me. January's budget was pretty much the same as Decembers Budget, and I expect February to be similar except that I need to make a few changes to utilities and insurance/medical based on costs the past few months.

I can truly only say, my dog ate most of my receipts for December. I pulled all my December receipts out on my table to go through them. I bought a lot of food stuffs as gifts. I left them on my table and my young dog decided it was a good day to learn to climb on the table, grabbed the stack and half chewed them. The dog loves to chew paper (tissues, magazines, letters, she's a bit odd) SOOO, I know I went over in my food category, but lots of that actually needed to be re categorized as gifts (wine, food, treats).

One of my goals for February was to do a Zero based budget. And it scares the hell out of me. For the first time in a very long time I am going to hold myself accountable for every penny I earn. I did a quick look at a proposed budget last night and if my budgeting figures work out, I'll be able to have almost $500 leftover. That money is earmarked for my ING account/EF account. $500 is a lot of money and my plans for it at this point are to go right into savings or my Roth IRA.

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