AlanBarber.Org
Thursday, April 08, 2004
Making a Budget and Starting to get into shape
Who knew making a budget was so hard!With the fact that I'm graduating from college soon I've been starting to act all mature and start thinking about the future. So, today I decided I'd build a budget of sorts. It's not a real budget since I still live at home and I don't have a job.
I'm throwing together average or guesses on all sorts of costs to see what living my life will probably cost. I've been pretty liberal in the costs and rounded up wherever possible.
I've been surfing all over the web to find the average costs to fill in or used example costs I know of locally. For example, I did a quick search of apartments in the newspaper and found one of the more expensive ones and used that. I choose a 2 bedroom townhouse that rents for 825/month in a nice area of town that I figure I might actually like to live in.
So far I've taking into account such things as rent, electric, gas, water, garbage, phone, cell phone, cable TV, internet fees, car payment, gas, food and $100/month put into a savings account. Obviously I still have lots of stuff not taken into account like insurance but I'll get to it. As of right now my monthly expensive are showing around $2000. That seems kind of high to me but at the same time not really. When you start thinking about every little thing you have to pay for in life it starts to make sense I guess.
It's kind of interesting to play around with the numbers. It's something I've really never though about before so it's very much a wakeup call to me.
Actually, now that I think about it, it's actually pretty depressing so in other news I've decided to start getting into shape.
I watched an interesting show on diets and the diet wars on PBS. Between the show and my girlfriend I've decided that I'm going to try to get into better shape. I'm not going to go on a full out crash diet to dump quick pounds but just try to better myself. My girlfriend is just an amazing attractive woman and I just feel like this gelatinous blob next to her. I have no energy, I get winded just walking to classes, and according to the goverment overweight so it's just time to wake up and do something about it.
I'll start out tomorrow by just sort of figuring everything out and deciding what exactly I want to do. So I think I'll start logging my experiences here since it should be a pretty good read!
