Mid-Month Mint: February

Let's take a look at my Mint pie chart for February so far:

As you can see, this month looks a little different than previous months. First off, it's worth mentioning that my student loan payment hasn't happened yet, so that will shift things around significantly. Second, there's a category here that I haven't seen in a while: travel.

I've mentioned a few times that I have a dedicated travel savings account, and this month was the first time that I put it to use, as I booked a cross-country plane ticket for May! I think this was the first time I've booked a trip with dedicated funds set aside to pay for it, and it felt pretty great. I don't have to worry about cutting down in other areas to pay my credit card bill this month; instead I can focus on continuing to contribute to my travel fund for the other trips I want to book and the expenses outside of the literal travel to get places. This feels like a huge step!

Health and fitness also makes an appearance here, as I've signed up for my second half marathon, taking place in late May. It was a less expensive race than my first one, and I think it will be fun. If my travel fund allows, I might even go a day early to the town where the race is taking place to avoid having to rent a car and deal with driving and parking. I'll have to see what work looks like that weekend, but it would certainly be more enjoyable that way.

Food and dining is a smaller piece of the pie this month, as I've been focused on not eating out for any meals - I'll talk more about that in a later post.

In all, February is going well spending-wise, and I'm hopeful that I can keep up the good work!

What I've learned about risk aversion by playing Farkle

When I was a kid, I went to the after school program at my elementary school every day through fourth grade. By the time I stopped going, I was almost always the oldest kid there, so naturally I had developed something of a rapport with the day care teachers. Basically, I was super-cool and awesome because instead of playing tag at recess (I was way too lazy for that), I played Farkle with the teachers.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was learning a lot about myself, and my comfort when it comes to risk.

Farkle, for those of you who maybe think I'm talking about a made up game, is a dice game. Played with 6 dice, you roll at the start of each round - any 1s are counted as 100 points, and 5s are 50 points. For three of a kind, you get 100x that number (three 6s would be 600 points), and there are additional rules that can earn you more points. The risk comes in next. After you've rolled once, you can either take the points you've earned and stop playing, or you can set aside at lease one scoring die and roll again. When you go that route, you can either win big, or lose all your points if you don't roll any more scoring dice.

When we play, R and I play to 10,000 points. I've noticed a few things about both of us in playing Farkle a lot over the past few weeks:

• We're both pretty risk averse. If we have five dice that we can roll, and we're only gambling 50 points, we'll probably go for it, but if there's only one die left, we'll take the points we have rather than risk them 9 times out of 10.
• When we're falling behind, we look for big wins. This is probably not the right move necessarily, as we lose a lot of smaller point accumulations in the process!
• We'll also take bolder risks when we have a comfortable lead, but comfortable means something different to each of us. To me, a comfortable lead is when my score is around one and 1/2 times his!
• We're both very competitive.

I can't speak to R's attitudes outside of Farkle, but I'd say that mine are pretty much in line with my attitudes in the game. I don't like to take big risks or gamble with any quantities that I'd be upset with losing. I'm a "what if" kind of thinker, and I know that can do a lot to both help and hurt me, in Farkle and in life.

One thing that I can absolutely point to in Farkle that relates to my attitude toward finance is the idea that I want to get as far ahead as possible, as quickly as I can. Right now, that means paying off my loans, but in a couple of years it might mean saving aggressively for retirement or other goals. The more I do now, when I know what my circumstances are for the immediate future, the more opportunity I'll have later on down the road to take reasonable risks. If I have a 8,000 point lead, I'll probably roll the one die left over, even if it means I might not score any points that round.

Snow Day, take 5

As we are now on our fifth snow day in the past three weeks, I thought I'd change things up a bit here and share what a typical snow day looks like for me. Enjoy!


5:30am - Alarm goes off; double check if snow day hasn't yet been announced, then back to sleep 6:00am - Wake up, make coffee, drink coffee
6:30am - Exercise. Usually some form of body-weight exercises. This morning, I did this Jillian Michaels yoga video. Ouch.
7:15am - shower
7:45am - Eat breakfast - today, breakfast was one of the banana muffins I made yesterday; while eating breakfast, start looking for recipes for more snow day baking
8:30am - Wake R, mix 12-hour Lazy Pizza Dough for later
9:00am - Watch Friends while R eats breakfast, and keep watching Friends for a while because Netflix is dangerous that way
10:00am - Check work email, realize there are things that need to happen since I haven't been at my desk since Thursday, get sucked in to work
11:30am - Bake brownies
12:00pm - Write blog post while brownies are in the oven! Alternatively, read other blogs
1:00pm - Go on a walk, because I haven't left the house since Sunday morning
2:00pm - Come home from walk and commence feeling very grateful for our over-heated apartment; defrost while watching Friends and eating brownies/lunch
3:00pm - Check back in to work email, respond to things as needed and add items to tomorrow's to do list via todoist; hope that school is open tomorrow
4:00pm - Whine about being bored until R agrees to play games with me. Start with Farkle, move on to Spit, accuse him of cheating when I lose
5:00pm - Check work email one last time, then read the internet for a while
7:00pm - Make pizza with mushrooms and garlic and way too much cheese
8:00pm - Eat pizza while watching Parks and Rec, then eat brownies while watching Parks and Rec; think how glad I am that I did yoga and went for a walk
9:00pm - Begin wondering if it's too early to go to sleep
9:30pm - Alseep

It's an exciting life. At least I'm avoiding online shopping? Here's hoping this is the last of the snow days...

Frugal Hobby Highlight: Games

I'm trying to get out of the habit of coming home every night, putting on Netflix, and binge watching Friends until it's time for bed. This isn't really even an issue of spending, but quality of life - I sometimes let myself believe that I "can't afford" to do anything else, so I may as well fuse myself to the couch. The worst part is, sometimes I'm really not even enjoying any part of it!

When I talked with my boyfriend about wanting to change our routine a bit, we thought it would be a fun idea to try playing more games. Board games, word games, dice games, card games. You get the idea.

What a fun change! Because I'm fiercely competitive, I've been petitioning for a new house rule which states that I always win at games, but so far, that hasn't worked out. Even so, we're enjoying literally sitting down to play together every couple of days. We were both off from school/work for a few days in the past couple of weeks due to snow, and playing games was a nice way to change up the pace of a day spent entirely inside our small apartment.

Right now, we're playing a lot of Farkle and Ticket to Ride. I'm also a big fan of Boggle. I recently learned about the best perk of R's weekend job at the toy store - he can borrow certain games and toys in order to learn more and be better able to explain them to customers. Which means we can test out games before we decide if we want to keep them! Like a library of games!

What are some of your favorite games? Would you let me pass a house rule stating that I am always the winner?

Resolution check-in: January

In order to hold myself accountable, and make sure I'm actually making progress on these resolutions, I'm going to try to check in here at the end of each month with a little recap of how I did.

January was not my best month financially. That said, I still managed to put a good amount of effort toward these goals. I'd say I'm making good progress. Let's take a look:

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Get my stafford loans under $9000
I paid a total of $719.50 toward my Stafford loans last month, which is just what I planned on. As of today, my total amount owed is down to $19,898.92. I'll need to up the ante on my payments to make this goal a reality, but for this month at least, staying on track felt like a major accomplishment.

I was also able to raise my automatic payment with Navient, so paying less than my planned amount of $719.33 is not an option anymore. To automate this even further, I set up a second checking account and scheduled half of my loan payment to come out of each paycheck and go into that dedicated account. Although I know the money is there, that account isn't linked to anything else, so getting to it would be a major pain, and it's highly unlikely that I'll be temped to use it for anything other than loans.

This month, I'll focus on throwing a bit of extra cash at my loans - I'm going to aim for $30 extra. Every little bit helps, right?

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Find a way to earn from a creative side hustle
This was probably the least thought out of my goals. I haven't made any progress on this yet. While it seemed like a nice idea in theory, I don't really know what I had in mind. Open an etsy shop for knit goods? That's about all I can come up with.

This month, I'll try to spend some time brainstorming on this goal.

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Learn a new skill
This is real! It's happening! Actually, a few times over. I may have been a bit over-zealous here. I'm working on the following:

• Learning some basic code at  Code Academy
• Brushing up my French skills on Duolingo in preparation for my trip to Montreal this summer
• Taking a copyediting course

I've been somewhat consistent with the first two. The copyediting course is perhaps the most concrete of these. I receive tuition benefits from work, and decided to finally take advantage by enrolling in at least part of the copyediting certificate program we offer. Of course, the first classes were supposed to be last week, both postponed due to snow. So now the first class is supposed to be today, but we have yet another snow day. The class is bound to start eventually, right?

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Take advantage of my employer 403(b) match

Well, I can't do anything much toward this except stay at my job until July. We'll call it a work in progress.

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Don't spend beyond my travel budget

I'm continuing to save into my vacation account, and think I should be on track for this. In the next couple of months we'll begin actually booking travel, so that's when the real test begins.

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Open a holiday/gift savings account

Done! And I set up a small automatic transfer from each paycheck. I think we can officially cross this one off the list.

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Continue tracking expenses in Mint

Right on track.

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So, things are moving along just as expected. I'll check back in next month with more updates!

The Importance of Diversified Goals

I'm not here to talk about investment strategy, at least not in the financial sense. I think we can all agree that you should get that advice from someone with more of a financial background than I have. Instead, I'm here to talk about how you invest your energy in goal setting.

I've always been a goal oriented kind of person. Crossing one thing off my list, and moving on to the next one - that cycle energizes me through everything I do. Paying off my student loans as quickly as possible is just one of the many goals I'm working toward now. I'm also saving for several trips, working toward some running goals, focusing on my diet, and working on new skills for both work and life. In fact, this blog is part of one of my goals - writing twice a week.

So why is it important to have diversified goals?

There are several reasons I think this is important. The first builds off the idea of Dave Ramsey's Snowball Method of Debt Repayment:

"Pay minimum payments on all of the debts except the smallest one then attack that debt with a vengeance. We're talking gazelle intense, sell-out, get-this-thing-out-of-my-life-forever energy. Once it’s gone, take the money you were putting toward that debt, plus any extra money you find, and attack the next debt on the list. Once it’s gone, take that combined payment and go to the next debt. Knock them out one by one." Source - Dave Ramsey

While I don't subscribe to this method of debt repayment, I do think that the Snowball Method can be applied in other areas of life, financial and not. This method basically says that you'll feel good as you cross debts off your list, and that good feeling will help carry you through to the next debt. I think the same can be said of goals - the more you achieve, the more you believe you can achieve.

This means that my debt repayment can't be my only goal - it will take me a couple of years to achieve it. In that time I'm bound to run into discouragement, especially if I don't have other successes to look back on along the way! My goals are spread out over various timeframes, from one day to one year to decades long. Those shorter goals will fuel my success in longer-term goals. In other words, I'm building the framework for success spirals.

Another reason that diversified goals are important to me is that they allow me to change focuses without feeling guilty. Now, I don't mean that I change focuses entirely, but having goals spread out over various interests means that when I can't fathom reading another article about personal finance, I can change gears and work on my half-marathon training plan or take a French lesson in Duolingo.

I spent an embarrassingly long time on this.

As long as I'm working on a goal, I feel fine about changing gears. When I move to something that's outside my goals - outside the grey circle - that's when I start running into problems. Since I have a lot of variety in my goals, I don't feel limited by them.

Finally, it's important to diversify your goals because your goals should reflect who you are. Now, maybe you are a person with only one thought at a time - you keep thinking that thought until you're done with it. I doubt it. I know I'm not that type of person. My goals reflect me, and they change as I change. If I only had one goal, paying off my loans, for the next two years, I think I would go insane. I would almost certainly drive everyone in my life insane if that's all I could talk about.

Having diversity in my goals allows me to have a diverse, fulfilling life. And that's what it's all about.

My one-out, one-in policy for clothes

An area of my budget that I often find myself struggling in is clothing. And it's funny, because I don't really enjoy shopping or clothing all that much. Actually, I really dislike shopping - I find the whole experience overwhelming. Regardless of that, I somehow end up buying clothes every month or so that I don't need, I don't wear, and I ultimately don't even want. Why do I keep doing that?

In an effort to continue my loan payments while also enjoying my life with occasional outings and trips, I took a look at my spending and my priorities, and it became really obvious what area I would be most willing to cut back or even cut out entirely: clothes.

I've never kept a lot of clothing around, and I recently did a pretty major purge of my wardrobe. I share a single closet with my boyfriend, so there simply isn't a lot of room for extra, unnecessary stuff.

Our closet

The rest of my wardrobe

These images sum up pretty much all of the clothing I own right now, with the exception of shoes, outerwear and underwear. There are a few items in the hamper, but otherwise, what you see is what I've got. It's not much.

When I first toyed with the idea of cutting back on my clothing spending, I thought maybe I could do what Mrs. Frugalwoods did - cut out clothes shopping for an entire year. I realized pretty quickly that that wouldn't work. My wardrobe is just the right size, but if something wears out, I don't have much of a choice but to replace it!

Instead, what I've decided to adopt is a "one-out, one-in" policy when it comes to clothes for the next year (and beyond!). That means if something has to go out, I'm allowed to bring something else in. Otherwise, I'll work with what I've got.

A couple of key rules:

• If I can reasonable mend an item or do without it, it doesn't need to be replaced.
• An unexpected "occasion" is not a reason to buy a new outfit - I can work with what I have, or borrow from a friends
• The exception to this rule would be a job interview
• I can replace my running shoes, once
• Finally, if I do change jobs and need to step up my work wardrobe, it will be on an "as-needed" basis, with a very strict budget

I think that about sums it up! I'm hoping that this new rule will help give me some structure in my spending decisions, and allow me to free up the extra for loans, travel and enjoying myself!

How do you manage clothes spending? I've never really had a system before, but I know plenty of people budget monthly or annually for clothing.