My Party, Part III
I didn’t keep it below $60, but I gave myself some great excuses as to why not.
I didn’t thaw the shrimp correctly and had to trash the entire bag. I was counting on it being a substantial part of the food that I was offering, so I decided to get more food. I also had to run out and get more things for the gin bucket. One of these gin buckets costs almost exactly $10.00 and it was almost gone with only four or five of the guests there, so I went and got more. My grand total came to $78, rounded to the nearest dollar. Since the shrimp cost $10-12 to begin with, I added that to the original $60, so I came quite close. I also had almost a full case of beer left over, a fair amount of boxed wine, and I received three bottles of wine as presents which I was not expecting, so I feel like I came out ahead.
Soon I will come out with a list of goals to help me to avoid spending more money. One of my goals is to post each day on how much money I spend so that I can see what I’m buying. I think that I will start this on 1 May, so that I can look at it as a month-by-month thing.
Today I will finish my taxes; when I started them last week, TurboTax showed me how much I could contribute to an IRA and what my tax refund would turn out to be. I need to enter some new documents that I found first to see how it’s changed, but last week it looked like I could contribute over $1000 and still get $1500 back. I can’t wait to get this money back, especially since it should bump up my net worth.
