In summary, I'm dead broke.
Which is actually a good thing because it made me take a hard look at my life. I'd talked about the clutter. Now I'm looking at the waste. Thousands of dollars wasted on "splurges" and "indulgences." Now I'm not saying that I need to live like a monk, but I also don't need to routinely spend 60 dollars on a single meal or an obscene amount of money on a trip to the salon. What's more, I work in a career where a high portion of the population live at or below the poverty level. They make ends meet on a fraction of my pay...and here I am barely getting by. I'll be honest; I'm ashamed of myself. And I'm tired of the debt. I'm tired of feeling like one month of unemployment would sink me.
It's time to start a life of frugality. In baby steps.
Obviously, the first step was looking at what I can and cannot live without. One thing is for certain: I can't get rid of my internet...not gonna happen. In addition to helping me save money (DIY videos, access to sales and online auctions, etc...), I need it for work. I thought about getting rid of cable, but with the promotional deal I have now, it's only 10 dollars more for cable and internet than internet alone. If I didn't have cable, I'd spend way more than 10 dollars on a single trip to the movie theater...even with my monstrously large dvd collection. I'm going to try and make the transition to life without cable, but I'll probably wait until after the promotion ends. Remember, baby steps.
Restaurants. It's going to be hard to cut back on this one. I tell you, moving to Savannah was as tough on my waistline as it was on my pocketbook. Some of the food here is divine. Especially the seafood. I think that if I say "never again visit a restaurant," I'd end up going crazy with splurges. So I'm going to start with no more than 2 visits a month and no more than 10 dollars per visit. To those who have been pinching pennies for years and years, you might be rolling your eyes, but that's actually a huge cut for me. Not so much for lunch...I've almost always brought a lunch from home and my job offers affordable meals as well. It's dinners that do me in. You're tired. You're hungry. You pass by 20 different restaurants on the way home. You think how easy it would be to just hop on the computer and order a pizza...it even comes with illustrations showing the cheese and onions and mushrooms being added with each click. Hmmmm. But I am going to resist. Plus, there's one meal in particular that I want to make a habit of getting because I can use it to make three separate meals, all for under 10 dollars. But more of that later.
So I've been scouring the internet, "stealing" ideas here and there from those who have been successful in living the frugal lifestyle. In the next few posts, you'll see how I try (and sometimes fail) to emulate them.
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