Budgets Suck

This month’s net worth may look grim, but in reality it is a shining beacon of hope.

What?  Back sliding?!

I know it seems that way but this is life with delayed billing.  My company is due to reimburse me for about $5000 of expenses and that doesn’t even include my compensation fees.  However, that check is not coming in until NEXT WEEK!  So we’ll just have to live with this negative net worth until next month, which I will be watching CLOSELY.  The goal was June 2012 and it looks like I am juuuuuust going to make it but it’s going to be close.

Technical Difficulties

Somehow, about 5 days ago, Mint told me my networth was -$12,000!  I was like wha- WHAT?!  For some reason it had duplicated two student loans, adding over $6,000 of debt to my account.  It’s a pretty easy fix in Mint, just contact customer service to remove the duplicates and then set them to Hide so they don’t show up in your calculations until the fix is done.  It just gave me a little fright as I was scanning through transactions wondering where that extra six grand went!  I was pretty sure it was a glitch but there’s always that little voice in your head that’s like, “Maaayybe it is real and I am not gonna make my goal and that would make me a sad sad puppy.”  But thank goodness that was not the case.

Asset Drop

My Cash Savings went way down but I think that’s mostly due to waiting for reimbursements and pay checks (plus a little over spending which we’ll see in the budget).  Real Estate went down too, surprise surprise.  The AC went out at the Rainbow House with a condenser leak and cost $700 to fix it.  $700!  Although I am still losing money every month on my real estate, I still only pay on average $380/mo on rent and I get houses, so yay.  Plus, all 8 rooms are FINALLY rented out again, so next month should look better.  Roth IRA drop is no surprise as it is summer and that historically always happens.  I did sell a lot of my stocks, but some of them I wanted to keep as an experiment.  We’ll see what happens!

Budgeting

This was a bad month for budgeting.  I went over $459!  All that now has to go into savings of course per my rule.  But let’s see what I went over on.

Went to a lot of movies this last month.  Avengers came out!!  Saw it twice!!  If you haven’t seen it, go!  It’s awesome.  Digressing, I spent $70 out of my $30 I have budgeted for movies.  Gotta cut back in June.
Eating.  Food is always a big problem for me.  I travel and eat out a lot and thusly go over my allotted budget most months for this.  But this month, I really outdid myself.  I spent $814 on Food and Dining when I was supposed to only spend $480.  Most of that was out at restaurants of course with groceries being the second offender.  While I went out on a lot of dates this month and I wanna blame it on that, you can hardly say that cost me over $300!  On the positive, I actually went UNDER BUDGET on Fast Food!  Yay healthy!
I spent $43 on Gifts instead of $25 but that’ll pay me back in Karma right?
I spent $95 over budget on Health and Fitness.  I registered for the Tough Mudder this coming fall which costs $135, but will be totally worth it!
And lastly, I went over on shopping by $62, mostly on travel books oddly enough.

All in all, it was a month ill-preparing me for June’s victory, but I believe a victory it shall still be!  Stay tuned!