Permission and Freedom to Spend Wisely

Currently, I work one full-time job and several part-time and part-time casual jobs, so you can imagine that my income fluctuates from month to month. Lately, I have been thinking back to my first meeting with Carrie and she asked me if it was hard to keep track of all my bills, accounts and things. My answer to her was “no, not really”. Before Project Money I honestly thought I was not really worried about money and I had not gone over the deep end yet. I knew that I had a lot of debt and it would take time to get out of it, but I had it under control or so I thought. For each month I kept a list of all my bills, the amount due, the amount owed, the amount paid and the due dates in a tablet. I would not fill in the amount paid column until I actually initiated the payment and would check it off when the payment cleared my checking account. I have been doing this since I moved here and had my first apartment. However, the crazy thing is that I would check it quite often to see how many more bills I had to pay and how I could ensure that they would be paid before the due date. I now realize that I was definitely a little beyond the point of worried, perhaps obsessed. I would honestly check my accounts and look at the tablet almost every day, sometimes twice a day to make sure I didn’t “miss” anything. I was definitely a money worrier and did not know it.

Lately, I have noticed that since I have been budgeting with a realistic budget I don’t think about it as much. I still keep my tablet—I find it useful to have a general reference in one place—and I still check my accounts but definitely not every day or multiple times a day. I do still plan out which bills will get paid by my first, second, third check but I don’t sit and think about this every day or every week. A budget is very important and for me it gives me the permission and freedom to spend wisely and to some extent freely without the guilt and urges to spend erratically. I feel like I am truly on my way to living within my means.

Recently, a friend was telling me about a new iPhone app from www.mint.com. Since I did not have an iPhone I wasn’t too interested at first. Then a co-worker, who did not have an iPhone, mentioned it, so I checked it out. It is a pretty neat website that will definitely help you get organized. It reminds me of Quicken or Microsoft Money but it is free and available online so you can check it anywhere. You can view all of your accounts and balances in one place and it has many tools and analyzers to help you see where you are spending money, as well as budgeting tools and did I mention it was free. It was recommended by several business magazine and they boast that they use the same internet security as banks—for whatever that is worth.  I suggested it to one of my friends who does not want to track her expenses because she knows she won’t like what she sees—and she probably doesn’t want to do the work. Summit Credit Union has a similar tool called Debt in Focus, http://www.debtinfocus.com/?refer=SummitCU, which I also mentioned to her because she is concerned with internet security. Unlike mint.com you will have to input your own financial data but you will get a nice colorful PDF document of your data. Debt in Focus has many of the same tools and analyzers but the data is static. They both are really nice, free (I really like free) tools to use to help you get started.  Check them out and let me know what you think.