Break Even Week 4 Update

I am so close.

This week, I made exactly $420. Exactly my break even number. If I had stayed strictly to my budget, this would have been the first week I’d broken even. Bud I didn’t.

This week, as I said yesterday I overspent my grocery budget. I overspent my entertainment budget a little too because we went out to dinner Thursday night (on serious travel burnout) and then again for our typical Saturday night dinner with friends. The interesting thing for me is that even though we went out twice, we were only $10 over our entertainment budget, when in past weeks we’ve done a lot worse than that. Maybe it was coming back from being away, maybe it was because we’d been to restaurants with our parents so much, but I realized Thursday night that we can have nice dinners we really like and giant sweet teas at the deli for only $15 for the two of us. And we like the deli. We really like it there, we love their tea, the food is always more than sufficient (and for $15 we got huge “I spent 11 hours on a plane and have only eaten one meal today” dinners). $15 for dinner makes us really happy. So why are we spending so much more than that?

I also made a lot more money this week than I have. Since my weeks run Thursday to Wednesday, this week included a marketing workshop I did for my employer, which paid significantly more than usual. I also had a rebate come in and some other things. I’m including my interest to my ING account which paid out, since the end of the month fell within this week.

Payouts are also coming in from things long since done. I got a $25 payout from Helium today, which I requested about a month ago and which I’ve been earning since January. I also got a very unexpected $3 payout from Daytipper from a tip I submitted at least 6 months ago and never expected to be compensated for.

I still need to do better though. I started a second class today, and have another one starting next weekend, so I’m going to go from working 6 hours a week at my part time job to about 18. More and more, the realization is coming that I’m just going to have to work for my money, but again 18 hours is something I can easily live with and I’m very grateful that it’s available.

I applied for a couple of online keyword writing jobs this week as well, and I am going to try to spend more time writing for Associated Content. Hopefully, if I get enough things going, pretty soon I will start to see some actual progress (and maybe even catch up a bit).

$420 Break even number
+$10 Entertaiment overbudget
+$70 Grocery overbudget
-$370 Teaching/tutoring
-$5 Essay Grading
-$10 Rebate
-$7 ING interest
-$.07 Paypal Dividends
-$25 Helium
-$3 Daytipper
Deficit $80
Total for summer: $799 deficit