Week 1 income/expense review

Every week, I'll be posting my expenses and income for review and analysis. Since this is the first week, I'm doing a little bit of an extension to capture the first of the month.

2/1/08-2/9/08

Income:
1023.37

Expenses:
1405.17

Total:
(381.80)

Obviously not the best week. Where did the money go?

• $650 to rent
• $88.42 to dining
• $35 to entertainment
• $23.43 to household
• $35 to transportation
• $580.06 to medical

$161.85, or 11.5% of this week's spending was purely discretionary. I went out twice. Had I not done that, I would have saved $85 the first night and $43 the second night. The first night was a planned expense, I had not gone out in several months, and I wanted to do something nice for a friend as a thank you, so I combined those two choices. The second night was unplanned, but it was work related and semi-obligatory. I also bought a headset (the household expense) to use with my VOIP service. While technically this wasn't a required expense, using my computer to make phone calls will be significantly cheaper in the long run than using my prepaid cell phone.

$670 (47.7%) was mandatory, $650 in monthly rent, and $20 in transportation costs to get to and from work.

The rest, entirely consumed by medical expenses, were for lab tests, X-Rays, and one doctor's visit. Depending on how my insurance company evaluates my deductable, I may receive $396 of that back. I'm not counting on it, however.

So looking ahead to next week, I will be paid again on the 15th, and should not have the vast majority of these expenses. I will have some transportation costs and some dining costs. However, I intend to try to keep my spending to under $100 for the week.