1.50 breakfast burrito
1.00 can of coke zero
11.00 dinner out for friend's birthday
7.50 bottle of wine
21.00 total
I'm at -11 dollars after the first day. This is not good. Let's see...
1.50 is probably a pretty decent price for breakfast, at least a breakfast that I didn't make myself. Cooking at home would of course be cheaper. The coke... well, I'm trying to break the caffeine addiction. I lasted until 2:30 and then I caved. I won't be habitually spending money on meaningless beverages. The dinner out? I got the cheapest thing on the menu ($7), but then you add in tax and tip and a contribution for the birthday boy's dinner. The wine, obviously, I should have had the willpower to resist.
The problem is that there are several things I simply have to pay for today. Shampoo and cat food, for a start. I'm just going have to buy what I need to and make it up later in the week.
2 comments:
For buying groceries and necessary household items, are you going to buy these in one go and amortize them over their useful life.
For example, I'm not sure if you eat eggs, but lets say you buy a carton and eat one egg a day for 12 days. The price you pay for the carton plus tax on that carton shouldn't all go towards 1 days spending, but should be divided by 12. Then every day that you eat an egg, you add that to your total cost for the day. Unfortunately if you leave the eggs and they go bad, on the day you have to throw them out, you'd have to write off the eggs that you no longer have, which would be a big hit on a day.
Okay okay, I admit, I'm kind of an accounting dork
If you are a dork then I am too, because I too have considered this.
You're right, in an ideal world, I wouldn't post how much I spent at the grocery store in a given day, but rather, how much I'd eaten out of items previously purchased (two slices of bread at 9 cents each, one spoon of peanut butter estimated to be 1/50th of the jar at 12 cents, one spoon of blackberry jam estimated to be 1/20th of the jar at 42 cents) (I like expensive jam).
The first issue, obviously, is one of simplicity (or the lack thereof). I don't think I could accurately calculate how much every molecule I eat costs, even if I had the time to do so.
The second issue is more intrinsic to the very nature of this experiment. I am chronicling how much I spend, rather than how much I consume. The issue is how much money is in my bank account, rather than how much money I have used to sustain myself that day.
Thus, if I spend $12 at the grocery store one day, I'll post that as $12 for the day, and any of that food that I eat is then "free."
Still, in the spirit of full disclosure, I think that on days I don't spend any money, I should mention what I ate out of the kitchen that day. And I should also mention when I have to throw food out. Because that's definitely wasted expenditure!
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