$50

(No pictures in this post, sorry. It was bound to happen one of these days! I suppose I could've dressed it up with generic "dollar" and "lightbulb" and "confused expression" images off the Internet, but...meh.)

One of Levi's and my joint goals for 2010 is to take a tighter rein on our finances...not necessarily cutting back, but becoming more cognizant of where our money is going. Our budget still needs fine tuning, but at the moment we've earmarked $50 apiece in "play" money out of this last paycheck. This is separate from money for dinners out, movies, etc. - this is our own personal spending money to do with as we wish. I'm sure this is like "DUH" to a lot of people, but it's kind of a lightbulb moment for us (or me, anyway), so roll with me...or Back button, whatever.

So anyway. Now I've got this $50 in my pocket - literally, I have $50 cash in my pocket - and I'm considering all the things I could do with it.

• I could buy a bunch of new paperbacks
• I could buy 50 cans of pop, one at a time (not likely - even I don't drink 4 cans of pop a day...at least not every day)
• I could buy something cute to wear - a whole outfit if I shop frugally enough
  
• I could treat myself to pizza lunch a couple of times, or McD's a bunch of times
  
• I could hoard it for my [insert expensive item here] fund.

Truth be told, I will probably end up splitting the money between most of these things. But how? It seems so elementary, but for me it's actually kind of a paradigm shift (thank you Steven Covey) to consider what I want to spend my money on in advance, instead of wondering where it all went. For example...

One of the things on my wish list is a Kindle...$259. At $50/check, it could be mine-all-mine in less than three months! But tempting as that is, I'm not going to stash the *entire* $50 away every time - either I would end up being cranky because I don't have any fun money for weeks on end, or I'd steal it from myself, and that's both guilt-inducing and setting up a bad precedent.

So I definitely know I want to save some and spend some. But how much? I've never really kept track of how much money I spend on things like gas station snacks, fast food drive thru, throwing a new book in the shopping cart at Target. But I've got to start somewhere, right? So for this week (two weeks, technically) I'm going to put half aside for my [fill in the blank] fund, and see how far I can stretch the other half. If I make it the full two weeks with some left over - woo hoo! Then I'll have a whole new slew of options - add the leftover to my fund, roll it over to the next pay period, spend it on a mini-splurge and start the next week off at $0 again. If I don't make it the full two weeks...I'll survive, and I'll have a better idea of what I need to do differently next week.

Hey, this money management thing is kind of interesting.

Now, this is all still a work in progress. Take "buy myself something cute"...Levi and I haven't nailed down certain details, like is there a clothing allowance ("line item" in accountant speak) in our new-and-improved household budget, for replacing things like worn-out jeans, or does that come out of our personal spending? Or buying snacks - oftentimes if I pick up a pop for myself, I'll grab one for Levi as well, and vice versa, and I don't want the concept of "personal spending money" to turn us into selfish jerks - "I didn't get you one because it came out of MY money," or nickel and dime our relationship to death ("you owe me a dollar and 63 cents!").

Hey, this money management thing is kind of tricky.

Anyway, that's that. I've been mulling this over for a few days now - ever since Levi and I first discussed the cash allowance idea - and I think it has helped a lot to get it down in writing.