Living Paycheck to Paycheck

Thanks in large part to my tax refunds/rebate, my net worth went up a fair amount!  Yay!  You can access my page here.

Last month’s net worth: -$9,406
This month’s net worth: -$6,293

For a difference of: $3,113

Reasons for this:

Even though money is only being added to my 401K currently (about $78 each paycheck), the money in all three retirement accounts has grown a little.

Tax refunds+rebate= $2294

$100 owed to me was paid back.

$35 from Revolution Money Exchange.

Didn’t spend too much last month while budgeting.

I’ve updated my Net Worth since it’s the first of the month.  For some reason, it won’t show up as a picture on my side bar, so I have a link to my page under the blogroll.  I may end up moving it to a more prominent spot.  Right now you can access it here.  My net worth has risen $1,978 in the last month to -$9,406.  This is for a few reasons:

1.  Last month I didn’t take into account my 401K from my current employer.  At this point, I’m only contributing 3% of my salary (they match 50% up to that point), so it’s less than $800, but it’s still something.

2.  I contributed $1000 to a traditional IRA and it’s already gained more than $20 in interest.

3.  I changed my car loan agreement with my dad, lowering my interest rate to 6% and extending the length of the loan.  My car loan total is a little misleading because I have down the entire balance plus the interest I’ll be paying, assuming I pay exactly $88.71/month (until November 2010), $5000 November 2008, and $500 November 2010.  So my balance is lower than indicated, but I don’t keep my amortization schedule sheet on hand to determine exactly what my balance is each month.  I might start doing that in November after I pay the big lump sum.  My student loan balance is calculated for me, so that is correct.

Soon I should be receiving my $600 tax rebate and my over $1600 tax refund, which will be nice.  I’ve thought about changing my withholding, but I haven’t yet worked a full January-December year yet, so I think that I’ll wait until next year to look at that.

This month I’m also going to track what I spend, which I’m looking forward to and dreading all at once.

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.