May Expenses

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Here are my expenses for May. As you can see they went up dramatically.

Rent/Household

$500.34

Utilities

$53.59

Transportation

$428.77

Food

$31.60

Education

$556.47

Medical/Dental

$912.09

Entertainment

$35.46

Debt

$100.00

Total

$2618.32

The biggest expense was my oral surgery which I had to pay out of pocket. This month my medical/dental expense should only be about $100. Also I had to pay for a one credit class that I added after I had used all my financial aid. My education expense for this month should be $0. With those two expenses reduced or eliminated I should have about $1400 to use to pay down debt and build up my emergency fund. All other expenses should remain roughly the same.

June Challenge

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I’ve decided to have a one month challenge every month. I lost ten pounds during last month’s challenge. That was more due to eating being painful due to the oral surgery than any self-discipline on my part. Anyway I’ve decided to try to continue the weight loss. To do this I’m going to stop drinking soda and run three times a week. The running should be easy since I like running I just have to get back in the habit of doing it regularly. Cutting out the soda will be more difficult. I’ve tried to stop drinking soda several times and have never lasted long. I know that cutting the soda out of my diet would be a significant benefit to my health though. I drink way too much soda now and it makes up a large percentage of my calories. Eliminating that should lead to weight loss and hopefully better sleep as well.

Grocery Challenge Results

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Depending on how you look at it the Grocery Challenge could be considered either a failure or a qualified success. I’m going to call it a qualified success. My original goal was to spend only $1 on groceries for the month. Then I changed it to $5 then to $10 and I spent more than both of those goals. The last part of the month I was depressed and whenever I feel depressed I eat junk food. The final result is that I spent $31.60 on food for the month. Although this is far more than my goal it is still a pretty low monthly total so I don’t consider the Grocery Challenge a complete failure. There is still plenty of food in my pantry so I should have a low food total for June as well.

Turning Off the Gas

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I’m talking about natural gas not gasoline. My local gas company has raised their customer charge from about $14 a month to $25 a month. This means that I have a $25 gas bill before I use any gas at all. This resulted in my current bill being $5 higher than the previous month even though I hadn’t used any heat and used less gas in this billing period. It appears that my gas bill will be $40 a month just for hot water and cooking.

That seems like an excessively high bill to me so I decided to fix it by canceling my gas service. Cooking won’t be a problem since I don’t do much cooking anyway. What cooking I do can be done with the microwave or George Foreman grill.

Hot water will be a little more difficult to do without. With the hot summer days a cool shower might be nice from time to time. I’m not big on cold showers though and I’m going to want a warm shower at least. This can be solved by showering at the gym. This will also force me to go to the gym more often which will hopefully result in my working out more. I’ve also considered getting a solar shower and using that.

So far I haven’t had to use any of these solutions. Although my gas was supposed to be turned off last Tuesday and I’ve already received my final bill I still have gas. I’m not sure if there is a delay in turning it off or what. I guess I’ll find out eventually when I either receive a bill or the gas is actually turned off.

Find a Mechanic You Can Trust

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While I’m hiking I am posting some of my posts from two years ago when most of you weren’t reading this blog. This post originally appeared in May 2007.

This is probably the best way to save money on car repair. I needed to get my car repaired last week because it was running poorly and getting terrible gas mileage. That is never good but it is especially bad with the current gas prices. The first shop I took the car to told me the problem couldn’t possibly be what I thought it was and they would need to run diagnostics to determine the problem. I didn’t want to do that so I took the car to a second shop. They thought the problem could be as I thought but wanted to run diagnostics to see if there were any other problems. After running the diagnostics they told me it would take $430 to do the basic repairs and there was a total of $1200 of repairs that needed to be made. My car is worth $1000 tops so there was no way I was going to put that kind of money into it.

I ended up driving three hours to the mechanic in the small town where my mother lives. He had done repairs for me in the past and I was always pleased with his results and the cost of his services. He fixed the car for $140 and it now runs fine. I’ve had a dramatic improvement in gas mileage as well. Since I do delivery as my main job the gas savings will soon cover the cost of the repair. Even when I figure in the cost of driving three hours each way I saved a significant amount of money over what it would have cost me to have it repaired here. And I don’t think the total cost of driving there should be added to the repair since I also got to visit with my family and take care of some other business while there.

In conclusion when you find a reliable and honest mechanic stick with him. You could easily save hundreds and perhaps thousands in repair costs over the life of your vechicle.