Saturday, October 04, 2008
Fresh...
Strangely enough things are looking up again. Or, it's difficult to describe, but in a really weird way the above song just really clicks with my current mood. It's slightly playful, light, optimistic. The strings are just so sexy and the beat continues to move things on with great ease.
School started again a bit less than a month back and for the first period I'm only looking at two courses. That said, I did already read the course book for a course starting in the second period. Out of the two courses, both promise to be interesting, but in different ways. The advanced course in software business is actually an interesting course with a small group of people and the sessions are more discussing in nature. And then the other one... Software Development Project I. There's an eight person team and the intent is to revamp some older piece of software for an external client. And I'm having some sort of a culture shock with our project manager, who seems to not have any experience in running these types of projects... Or any projects for that matter.
Work is taking up more and more time and even though I'm being pushed increasingly hard by managers, it's still amazingly enough interesting and challenging. And even though at times I'm just about ready to give up and throw my hands in the air, I just end up pushing on. This whole project has taught me so much that even now I consider my time very well spent.
What else...? I bought my first blazer a couple of days back and I'm totally addicted to it. Wore it yesterday for the first time and combine it with khaki trousers, a light shirt, a repp tie and voila, amazing. The blazer itself promises to be one of the more versatile investments that I've made and it certainly has that prep-appeal present. And yes, the really relevant question here is: How is it possible that I've not owned one before?
And while taking into account the current situation of the economy, I've also been running a personal project during this year of minimizing my fixed costs by shifting e.g. phones and the internet to the company, killing some of my own magazine subscriptions that I can read at work, and so on. But amazingly enough it seems that when you save somewhere, you start spending elsewhere. So now that the fixed costs are down, my next project is to shift myself to a 20e a day budget. Meaning that every morning I take a 20e bill from the ATM and I have to get through the day with that. And whatever remains of it at the end of the day, I through that into a glass on my bookshelf. This means that hopefully I'll be able to cap my monthly spendings quite a bit. Because it would really be a shame to miss the upcoming possibility to broaden my investment portfolio due to lack of cash. I guess I'll also need to review my strategy for investing and go through some fundamental questions...
But, it's Saturday morning and even though it's slightly raining outside, I'm feeling great and a large breakfast might be a good idea before the evening in with some friends.
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7 comments:
You know, that 20€/day thing, with the extras going into a jar, sounds like an idea worth trying myself. Thanks for that idea. :-)
I assume that you keep the glass as an "untouchable" object, a total "no go" area? No taking out even 2€?
Actually, things sort of escalated. I've been buying tons of champagne recently. :P
:P
Well, let's go all theoretical here and assume you hadn't. :P
Also, what happens with the glass at the end of the month? Get's dumped onto your bankaccount? Used to buy stuff? I assume the later, but...
Well, the idea was that once the money goes in the glass, it stays there. When the glass contains "enough" money, it just gets dumped into an account that doesn't have any cards tied to it. As such the money shouldn't be touched.
It's the same policy that I have had with my investments. Once I decide to invest a certain amount, it goes into the investment pool and is tagged. If I liquidate the assets, the money still remains tagged and can only be used for other investments. The only situation where I can deviate from this is if my finances are in such a horrid situation that I absolutely cannot survive without liquidating my positions and using the money to buy food, etc.
Definitely sounds like a good idea to me. Just two more questions. ;P
Did you also plan to buy groceries with those 20€/day?
Even if not, are there any other allowances for, let's say buying books, or will those have to come out of the 20€ as well?
Well, I'm a bachelor so I don't buy groceries. Typically 20e a day will get me two warm meals (if I need the other one) and still leave ~10e left for other things.
As for buying books and other things, I had the policy of not counting those into the 20e. Those would be considered case by case and I would attempt to also optimize there (e.g. if the books are semi-related to my work, I was able to argue that they are for my personal development). :)
Additionally there was this gray area covering e.g. costs incurred from dates, etc. This was outside the scope of the 20e/day as it might appear somewhat cheap to arrive at a first or second date and note that "Oh, I still have 3e left in my allowance for today, so let's just have a cone of ice cream. Oh, and you're paying for your own." ;)
Are you planning to try something like this?
Yeah, that's why I'm asking. I'm in a slightly similar situation, where I catch myself spending far too much money just because I have it in my pocket and I want to cut this behaviour by 100%. My problem has always been that I cannot focus on purchases. Be it PC components that I really should replace, a larger number of books, or just saving up spending money for a holiday, I could almost never get to that goal, because I would spend it all in petty crap. Another thing that has always annoyed me greatly, was that I would occasionally stumble over something that I'd really like to buy, because it was up for a cheap price at ebay (vintage computers, for example, which I do collect to some extent), up for sale at a store or so, but I would have just spent the needed 30€ (for example) on crap.
So anyways, since I usually never eat breakfast and get a free dinner at home, this means I could even warrant something as low as 6€ a day (which would buy me the most expensive meal at my university's mensa), because I don't really go out afterwards. That would mean that I'd be at 30€/week (and 120€/month), which - granted - doesn't cover weekends, but I am not a big weekend spender anyways. Usually I get some Kebab with Fel and I was also planning on cutting back on that anyways, especially with him leaving Germany in about a month again. :P
That leaves me with several options. I was definitely planning to use my second account as a monthly dump for all the small-scale leftovers, as mentioned in your general idea, but now I am wondering if I shouldn't just pour my paycheque leftovers into that account as well.
That is, I could:
- Either dump my entire paycheque, minus the ~120€ into the second account,
- Regulate a fixed amount that I might spend from the paycheque (percentage?) and dump the rest (plus eventual leftovers at the end of the month) on the account,
- Take whatever is leftover from the paycheque at the end of the month, after buying even more books, model kits, vintage port and cigars from it.
I'm not sure, however, which approach I should take. For the month of december, I decided to go with the first one, simply because I'm saving up as much as I can for my christmas holiday in the US. After that, we'll see. I have to think about it, but I think I will most likely end up with the second variant, with maybe a 50-70% saving rate.
While in theory, nothing would keep me from breaking the rules, it's worth a try and would cost me nothing. I guess I would make a rule for special allowances from this account, for at least semi-important, non-luxury purchases. Such as really needed computer replacements, or really surprising offers on ebay on stuff that I've been looking for.
In either case, whatever I don't spend I could save up for holiday spending money or maybe even finally get some money for investments again, as you were planning on. ;-)
P.S.: This has got to be the longest exchange of comments in your blog so far. :P
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