• Rent: -$845.00
• Utility: -$248.93

• Car: -$209.39
• Groceries: -$255.93
• Misc: -$88.41
• Health: -$451.01

• Eating Out: -$219.79
• Entertainment: -$56.00

• Savings: $3,000.00

• Interest: $54.21
• Wages: $3,374.52

• Committed expenses: 54.4%
• Irregular expenses: 6.5%
• Fun Money: 20.9% Vegas did that. In fact, on it's own, it was 6.9%...
• Long term savings: 9.3%

Still need to get that retirement account setup. I've finally made the math make sense of why you should open one... but I gotta find something that makes sense, with good growth, and won't charge me freaking insane costs (like the "easy" mutual funds that WaMu & Wells offer).

There are but 6 days left in July... at least I'm doing this before it's actually August.

• Committed expenses: 42.1%
• Irregular expenses: 12.7% Bought some new tennis shoes, and that kicked me over 10%. Oh well.
• Fun Money: 14.0%
• Long term savings: 108.5% Yeah, you read that right. Three transfers to ING; there's no reason to let that much $ just sit in my Wells Fargo account doing nothing. I'm amazed to say, I'm actually making some money off this interest. I earned ~$13 for the interest in June!

I need to get on opening an actual retirement account, but at least I'm saving some.

Oh yes, and new icon.

• Committed expenses: 46.5%
• Irregular expenses: 7.2%
• Fun Money: 3.3%
• Long term savings: 29.8% More money into my stock purchasing account, and again, two transfers to ING.

Not totally sure how I managed to run a month on so low. I think it was probably partly due to my being in NYC. Gas usage is down a bit, which is nice. Although I suspect that, even though I'm riding to work (and saving $ on gas) I'm driving to other places even more, so it's balancing out. *shrug* Riding is good exercise, too.

So I missed posting March, though I actually built the report for myself. Dunno why I never posted. So here's March:

• Committed expenses: 55.5%
• Irregular expenses: 38.5% Ow... but this was because of two very, very expensive gifts I gave (to my parents).
• Fun Money, 7.7%
• Long term savings: 25.2%. Put money into my stock purchasing account, and had two transfers to ING.

Took a long time for the transfer to go through, but sometime in April (after the money was available) I bought 1 share of Apple and 1 Pixar. And by the way, if anyone is interested in an ING account, let me know; you get a bonus for referring people (and the person you refer gets one too).

And now for April:

• Committed expenses: 43.6% I'm not really sure how I did that. Looks like a big part was less gas, and no trips to Costco. So I'll probably make up for it in May...
• Irregular expenses: 17.1%
• Fun Money, 19.6% My beautiful new LCD screens are definitely the cause, here.
• Long term savings: 9.3%. Only one transfer this month. May will also make up for it, I bet.

• Vanguard Index Funds 500 Index (Google Finance Yahoo Finance)
  Follows the market (that's what an index fund does). Should be safe, & higher growth than my high yield savings account at ING.
• Pixar (Google Finance Yahoo Finance)
  Price seems high relative to its history. Forbes MarketEdge says Stock shows Mildly Deteriorating Conditions. SCORE = -2. If you are long, hold current position. Do not initiate new position. Plus, Cars is coming out in early June, and the stock is down a bit. If I buy now & Cars does well, it'd be good (and logically, if it does bad I'd lose money). But, I'm not buying for the short term, and I've got a lot of faith in Pixar. Even if Cars bombs (which is possible), I trust Pixar to do another good movie after it & bring the stock price back up.
• Apple (Google Finance Yahoo Finance)
  For the past 6 months, it's about in the middle of its range. But any further range than that and it's really high. Not a big surprise, given the iPod & whatnot. But I'm not sure what Apple has up it's sleeve. Still, probably better to buy now, since I'm buy-and-hold, not looking for a quick buck. And Apple has a history of good ideas (and recently, of marketing them well, which they didn't use to do).

• Disney (Google Finance Yahoo Finance)
  It earns a 0.97% dividend (low, but at least it's something). Fairly stable price (not much up or down recently). Since it pays a dividend, that's not bad, but it's not a huge dividend, either.
• General Maritime Corporation (Google Finance Yahoo Finance)
  High dividend ($8, ~23%). And their business is "international seaborne crude oil transportation services." But I've never heard of them. Interestingly, of the top high dividend yield stocks, a lot of them are either real estate, or oil transport. Hm...
• Restoration Hardware

• Committed expenses: 69.4%, because of a $745.20 payment for health care. However, my work is supposed to reimburse me for that. So, ignoring that charge, I spent 44.7%.
• Irregular expenses: 18.3%. It's that high because I spent $435 on the Landmark Forum, which I'll cover in a later entry (but it was worth it). On the upside, that month I noticed I had been charged service fees by Wells (wtf?) for my checking account. After I had called a long time ago and told them to change it so I wouldn't start getting charged them. Called them up and got it fixed over the phone.
• Fun Money, 15%. Snowboarding trip (chains, ticket, rental) definitely added a lot, but it was worth it.
• Long term savings: 18.5%. I setup an automatic transfer to my ING Direct high yield savings account. I put in $562 during Feb. I've subsequently lowered the auto transfer amount, but it's still good to get the savings into a better account.

All in all, not the best month. For those keeping track, I spent 121.2% in total. I'm hoping March will go better, but we'll see...

Running a bit late on this, but at least I did it before March.

• Committed expenses: 57.5%, and Feb they'll decrease a bit more, because I decreased my Verizon bill a bit.
• Irregular expenses, however, are 212%. That is because I paid off my student loans; without the student loan payment it's still pretty high (15%) because I bought a new hard drive, got a tuneup on my car, and had two fairly expensive health charges.
• Fun Money, 11%. I think the snowboarding trip kicked it over.
• For once, though, I did something for long term savings! I put $500 into an ING Direct high yield savings account. Way higher interest (3.5% normally, 4.75% right now) than most savings accounts (I get 0.25% @ Wells).