$2885.96

That’s my documented spending for June. That’s nearly everything – rent, utilities, phone, groceries, dining out, beers, everything I could remember for the month, minus the first couple days before I kept my budget. That’s the good news – I think that’s a pretty small number, given that I live in San Francisco, one of the pricier places on earth. The bad news is the relationship that number has with my income, which I’ll spare you the details of.

Having realized that I need to keep a much warier eye on my spending, I started keeping a budget using a spreadsheet I got from PearBudget* a while back. Now, in 2004, I kept track of every dollar I spent using Quicken – seriously, to within less than $150 accounted for by the end of the year. That was a valuable exercise in that it helped me identify where my money was going and how it could be better spent, but it was also extremely tedious in that every penny had to be accounted for somewhere. So I had categories for my different savings, checking, and credit accounts, but I also had to account for cash and the change tub. Going to the ATM required balancing two accounts and putting away my pennies at the end of the night had to be documented, and I grew tired of it. This system is much more simple for me as I can basically just track numbers. Plus, since I host my budget on Google Docs, I don’t have to have my laptop in front of me to keep up to date – I can do it from any computer and even my phone. If this doesn’t strike your fancy, there’s another pretty good spreadsheet at Get Rich Slowly.

(Sidenote – While we’re on Google Docs, here’s a pretty good primer from Leonard Lin on using it to track portfolios yourself. Google Finance is now to the minute instead of the usual 15-minute delay, and you can pull content directly from them in the formulas for your assets. [via])

Anyway, since I’m paying more detailed attention to my finances at present, I’ve also done a lot of reading and looking for sites to help me get right with my money. Some of the best I’ve found are the aforementioned Get Rich Slowly and I Will Teach You to Be Rich, both of which present money saving tips and discussions on spending and wealth management, but mostly provide inspiration. I’ve also been checking out My Open Wallet, and  I really enjoyed this post from The Simple Dollar, which explains how to use ING Direct’s account features to help figure and maintain a budget, and recently added the site to my reader. I have an ING account, but never realized you could set up subaccounts to help budget for specific goals. That’s a neat hack by them and one I shall look into, as until recently I had just been dumping a tiny amount from my checking account into the ING savings. Finally, I’ve been looking at BlipBlap, particulary this post of 38 thoughts on wealth and prosperity, even though I violated #2 when I stopped the automatic ING deposits. As soon as I’ve got my head all the way above water, those are back on.

But back to the lecture at hand. Money is going to be tight for a while, there’s no two ways about it. Looking at my budget, it’s not like I overspent on much. I spent $50 on taxis, which I can reduce some.  I spent about $480 on food (thanks to the subsidized work kitchen!), which also isn’t bad but can be cut back – half of that was in dining out, and even those $5 lunches can be curtailed. I bought new clothes this month for a total of about $190, but that’s the first expenditure of that sort in a while, and in fact I’ve even been endeavoring to extend the life span of some of what I already have.  $144 in entertainment? That’s less than a beer a day. I also paid some irregular expenses this month, so we’ll have to wait for a few months to get more accurate numbers. But the point is that I’m doing it, and looking more closely at what I have and have not. My #1 priority at this point is to get out of debt as soon as possible and start building towards the future.

*Pear Budget is now a webapp, but I still have a blank Excel spreadsheet version. Email if interested.