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Is This In My Budget?

August 10, 2022 I don’t know about you, but Wednesdays are my (Krystal’s) craziest day of the week. I have around 5.5-6 hours of back-to-back meetings with lunch, if I’m lucky to take one at a normal time, being an afterthought. When one of my lunchtime meetings was cancelled this past week, I was excited to be able to eat, but as with all Wednesdays, I never make anything ahead of time because I never know if I’ll eat it or not. So, I resorted to an old habit and ordered Chipotle. (I won’t get into the debate of Qdoba vs. Chipotle with you, reader—Alisa and I debate that enough, but I will give you my two cents on the two rivals :) … Qdoba has amazing Queso and quesadilla option, but Chipotle’s salsas are unmatched, along with their vegetarian sofritas.) Moving on… I was about 5 bites in and it dawned on me. I dropped my fork into my burrito bowl and internally yelled to myself “IS THIS IN YOUR BUDGET?”. If you think I’m being dramatic here, I’m not. I frantically went to my Summit Climbr® app to see where my spending was at and revisited my weekly goal of ‘fun’ money that I have for myself. Upon a quick scroll, it became clear that I was within my budget. Phew. I picked my fork back up and kept eating. Either way the food would have been eaten, but I surely felt less guilt about it now than I did a few bites ago. 
Which brings me to an important part of budgeting that we have been talking with our financial coach – you still need to build in a place for fun things you want to do. Have a vacation you are saving for? Open a second savings account to track that. Want to go out for a weekly happy hour with friends? Allocate $X amount in your checking account to still be able to have fun. The mindset I have personally been working through is that just because you are on a budget, doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. You can still participate in fun things; you just need to be more strategic about it and really determine if it is a need or a want. You might also be interested in Whew and wow! This has been quite a challenging and eye-opening process! It has been very hard to do this project as part of a couple when both of us appear... During the week of November 23, we wrote about how we were going to look into options for cost-saving measures. One of those measures was to analyze any... This past weekend, we took our annual trip down to Chicago, which was also paired with a trip to the theater. With being in Project Money, have been more... Something that stands out lately are the number of outlets competing for one’s time, attention, and especially our hard earned money. I don’t know about... If it wasn't so cold out right now, we might not believe that the end of the year is fast approaching, but alas – it is! With that, we have been starting... Initially, we weren’t sure exactly what to write about for this week’s blog post. However, the subject came to us this past weekend as we were reviewing... Many of us enjoy hosting parties with friends and family for seasonal activities and Holidays but don’t want to break the bank doing so! For me and Krystal... I don't know about you, but I, Krystal, grew up in a pretty cold house during winter. We lived in a rural-ish area where natural gas did not run, thus... One thing we’re still working through is being a bit more proactive about unexpected house costs. Sure, we have small savings account for house expenses...