Okay, okay, okay…
In my last post, after spending *so* much more than I ever should have, I claimed that I’d right-the-ship this month.
So far, so good.
With all of my bills for the month of September already paid, I’ve only spent $2574.
That’s pretty good especially when you consider that it includes a few nights in a hotel room (for that family reunion in the picture) and, yes, even a hockey jersey. Or two.
But in the process of keeping my spending down, I haven’t been chopping into the mortgage like I have been for the last few months.
And, oddly enough, my savings rate hasn’t increased either.
So… I’m spending less but I’m not improving my financial standing any…
Weird.
I’ll give it another month but if I don’t see enough positive movement, both on the mortgage end and the savings side, I’ll go back to my tried and true weekly auto-transfers and spend as freely as I have been all year…
Seems that it’s one of those “all or nothing” situations…
I like your idea of doing the automatic weekly transfers and then spending whatever you want of the remaining amount.
But:
How exactly do you spend less but not save anything? What happened to the rest of the money??
You know, Zen, those are great questions…
Obviously the math doesn’t add up — spending less should lead to saving more — but I think that when I’m not tossing my money towards a specific target (like the mortgage or the savings account), the “progress” is a lot more cloudy.
I’m lining myself up to have spent around $3400 for the month of September. Still pretty lofty but not as high as I’ve been the previous few. At the same time, to cut my spending, I stopped my weekly mortgage payments.
On paper, it’s a wash, but when you look at the pace of my mortgage reduction, well, it looks like I had a terrible month.
I guess it’s just a motivation thing — I feel like my mortgage suffered and I gained nothing in the process.
[…] In short, I think this financial strategy failed. You’ll see what I mean in tomorrow’s net worth update. […]
[…] this one but we’d never once all gathered in the same room at the same time (though that family reunion in 2009 was quite impressive, at the same time, it was also slightly intimidating as it was dubbed […]